Blog them all

I had the chance to travel to California from last April to July. As any computer geek I had always dreamed about going to California, and mostly around Mountain View. Thanks for my friends, I had the chance to visit Google few times, Yahoo!, Six Apart, Google Android, Apple, some smaller private startups. I’ve got beers with the guys from GitHub (thanks Tom, it was nice meeting you), LightHouse, Twitter, LinkedIn, AfterShock (thanks James!). Orange Lab told me on Twitter I could call 1014 (A French phone number for customer support) to meet them (ahah). I’ve met many more people which I can’t list here, and I’ve also finally met Phil Jeudy (twitter).

I’ve attended the Rails Conf 2009 in Vegas, and the WWDC 09 in SF. The rails conference was very high level, Vegas had the cheapest hotels I could imagine for the room we got. On the other side the WWDC conferences were not as high level as I would imagine, but someone said 60% of the attendees never attended before. I would recommend going to both if it’s you work in those domains, meeting people in real is a big boost for your projects.

Something I did not have in mind, is the good general vibe you have in San Francisco. I had the chance to meet Shane Vitarana (blog), who published DrumKit on the Appstore (it’s featured in Apple ads, on Union Square on top of buildings, etc). He introduced me to many people, and we had a lot of fun together (I have to confess, I don’t go out much while I’m in Paris, but did almost every day in SF). Thanks Shane, you made my trip.

I’ve learned a lot being in San Francisco for that long, on iPhone projects as much as on Rails projects, and on web projects in general. If you work on ideas, make them happen in California. It won’t take longer than anywhere else, but the general impact might be much bigger for you. Raising funds is much easier too. I’ve met so many independent developers in San Francisco making lots of money (>$200K a year) without working much (but worked hard in the past, or had a good idea).

You have two kinds of people in San Francisco, the ones working 20 hours a day, or doing 2 hours commuting a day going from downtown to Mountain View and working for the big players. And you have the ones not working as much and enjoying life. I’d suggest going for the 2nd option if you plan to go to SF.

So would I go back to San Francisco ? Hell yeah ! But surprisingly I would go again not for work, but for the good vibe. Of course there are tons of IT companies there, and even the average level of software developers ain’t better than France (or other countries), you have way more people, way more companies. That operates like a magnet. At the end, you have way more projects happening there. San Francisco makes projects possible. My only concern is time does not run the same way in SF, and a one year stay would pass like a week in other cities.

See you soon San Francisco (my flickr California set).

I’m working on a Ruby on Rails plugin for managing iPhone 3.0 Apple Push Notification. Because this is under NDA I can’t say much about it here, but you’ll find a password protected git repository on the Apple Developer Forums, in this specific post. Patch and feedbacks welcome if you are an iPhone developer.

I also bought my tickets for WWDC 2009, and will be in California from April 30th to June 14th. I might also be at the Railsconf 2009 at Las Vegas but only on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I’d be interested to meet anyone in the iPhone/Rails community reading this blog.

EURO RSCG C&O a fait confiance à CONOVAE et son équipe pour le développement de son nouveau site communautaire dénommé le hub. Le site permet aux créatifs de montrer leurs créations et donne une place plus importante à l’équipe d’Euro. La possibilité de poster des vidéos, en plus de photos, de projets, ou de blogs, est particulièrement apprécié par les internautes.

Les créatifs d’Euro ont accès à des fonctionnalités particulières invisibles pour les créatifs qui ne font pas partis de l’agence, tels qu’un chat en live pour échanger des idées, ou encore un système de géolocalisation.

Le site utilise la technologie Ruby on Rails que CONOVAE maîtrise particulièrement bien (utilisation depuis plus de 3 ans, développement de plugins spécifiques, etc), ainsi que Ajax ou cela est susceptible d’avoir un intérêt (chat, envoi de commentaire, …). La partie créative a été réalisée par Reza Bassiri, Directeur de Création Design de l’agence Euro RSCG C&O.

Tout retour sur le site est bienvenue. Visiter le site du hub.

CONOVAE (la société dont je suis co-gérant) a travaillé pour et avec Unity pour la partie développement et intégration HTML du site du distributeur de film Francais Mars Distribution. Le tout a été développé sous Ruby on Rails en approximativement un mois. Le client possède une interface lui permettant de gérer l’intégralité de ses contenus de manière autonome, y compris les contenus multimédia (photos, vidéos).

Je vous invite à visiter le site et à le faire connaitre.

The Ruby on Rails caches_page is broken in many ways (to my believes), first of all it has a RACE bug because it does not create the cached filename atomically, and you will end up with 0 byte size cached filename. It also does not create lock files to have other process waiting instead of generating the same pages.

If you have 3 mongrel processes delivering the same non-existing (yet) page, you’ll end up with 3 mongrel processes for the same page. The following plugin does create lock files to have the 2 other waiting for a short amount of time, which should lower your cpu usage on high traffic servers.

Code is available at http://github.com/penso/caches_page_fix/

Besoin de signer des mails en X509 / SSL avec Ruby on Rails ? Conovae a développé pour Dimelo un plugin il y a quelques mois qui permet de faire cela de manière automatique, notre prestation incluait la mise à disposition du code sous une licence libre. Le projet est désormais disponible sur Github, sous licence BSD. Voir Plugin de signature X509 pour Rails.

Do you need to sign outgoing mails with X509 signature (openssl) with Ruby on Rails ? Our company Conovae developed for Dimelo a plugin which is now released for the mass. It includes testcase and performance test. See X509 signature plugin for Ruby on Rails.