Posted by Jacopo Murador
Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:46:00 GMT
If you’re a reader of this blog you are probably wondering why we’ve been so quiet lately. A lot happened during the past month and a half.
As a company we’re doing pretty well, we doubled our revenues, we opened a new office in beautiful Verona (Italy) and we have substantially improved the way we deal with project management and development. We are very proud of the fact we’ve always been profitable even if we received no money from VCs or other investors, slowly but constantly growing our business.
What we’ve not been able to do is to stick to what we really wanted to do. When we started we had a goal: we wanted to develop our own web application and sell it as a service. But the hard reality is we are a self funding firm and we ended up only doing client work to pay the bills. We only did client work for two years. Even if we know a consultancy agency would love to find itself in our position, we aren’t happy at all with that. Honestly nobody of us is happy anymore. We haven’t been pursuing our dreams, we only have been working hard on things which haven’t helped us achieve aour goals. At the end of the second year of SeeSaw’s life we sadly had to admit that we weren’t what we were expected to be and this forced us to make some hard decisions.
This’s why now SeeSaw will change a lot.
Paolo decided to move to London with his beloved girlfriend. He’ll start a new adventure, new challenges, will meet new people and have new opportunities. In his heart a foreign experience is what he always wanted to do. If you’d like to keep in touch with him or you’re interested in his Tabnav/RailsWidgets plugin, please visit his blog or consider subscribing to his RSS feed.
Michele will continue doing Java and Ruby development. He has a couple of personal projects he’s working on, after taking deserved break. You’ll probably hear about it in a few months.
Last but not least there is me. I will keep the company running and will lead the new SeeSaw way. From now on SeeSaw will build the web application it has been founded for. It is a financial analysis application for small/medium sized companies that – imho – will revolutionize the way they manage their resources and assets. No more client work, just stuff that matters.
Keep in touch, the new season is here!
Socialize it: 
Posted in The outer world | Tags change, future | 2 comments
Posted by Paolo
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:32:00 GMT
I just got back from RailsToItaly, the first italian conference about Ruby on Rails. It’s been a good conference, and the staff did a great job given that this is the first time they organize something like this.
The conference, with about 80 attendees, wasn’t too big. I see this as a big pro. It was very informal and you could talk freely with the speakers without encountering that ‘rock star’ attitude of the european RailsConf.
So, what did I see?
Zed Shaw – Keynote: The ethic programmer
Zed Shaw is a great speaker, It’s been a pleasure to meet him. In his talk he explained why most code doesn’t communicate well its intentions and how programmers should behave in order to be good citizens in their development environment.
The great thing was his laptop didn’t work well with the projector so he gave his speech without slideshow, and he did a great job indeed. This should let you understand how prepared and confident he was about the topic. Worth paying for.
James Cox – Scaling your app
James Cox has been another unexpected surprise. Very skilled and laid back guy, very easy to get along with. He gave us a presentation on scalability techniques. Maybe I just wanted a few more examples.. but maybe I’m too hungry.
Desi Mc Adam – DevChix + RESTful apps
Desi did a fair job and it’s been nice to have a chick speaking at the conference. She explained her effort behind devchix.com and gave a basic explanation of the REST achitecture in Rails. Maybe I’m too picky but she said nothing you can’t already find in the rails doc or in old posts online. Her speech has probably been good for beginners.
Nicholas Wieland – The Zooppa experience
Nicholas explained us how Rails let him set up zooppa.com in 40 days and 3 programmers involved. His presentation resembled the book “extreme programming: embrace change”, nothing less, nothing more. He’s a nice guy but didn’t give concrete advices to help other people achieve the same goals. Grrrrr… and he forgot to mention I trained his team.
Just one suggestion: next time show us at least one screenshot of the application you built!
Thomas Fuchs – script.aculo.us 2.0
Well, Thomas needs no introduction, everybody know how smart he is. He’s shown new features that will be available in forthcoming Scrip.aculo.us 2.0. If you wanna know more, just check out his presentation material. Side note: I loved his slideshow! gotta checkout the font: kofler.dot.at/c64/!
Paolo Donà – Rails Widgets
That’s me, what can I say? I feel my presentation went pretty well, with many questions and suggestions at the end. Maybe I was just a bit tired, due to my Japan trip. A few questions from early widgets users made me think I need to set up a better web page for it… and maybe a mailing list. We’ll go for it, just let me recover from the jet lag… or maybe I’ll let Chuky do it!
You can find my slideshow here. I don’t think it’s very interesting without me speaking along with it (damn Kawasaki style).. but.. maybe you just want to see my monkey!
Ettore Berardi – Search engines and Rails
Ettore gave a nice speech comparing different search engines and their use with Rails. This is a hard topic and it’s not easy task to explain everything in just half an hour. It’s clear that he’s tried them all and he’s confident with them. Even if he hasn’t put jokes in his presentation, it was funny enough… just reading a few plugin names made me roll on the floor laughing!
David Heinemeier Hansson – Remote Q&A
Nothing to say. Nice to have him remotely here, he’s always the rock star we all love and talking with him is interesting. as usual.
Eyal Oren – Semantic Web + ActiveRDF
Eyal made one of the most appreciated talks. He’s a very laid back and knowledgeable guy. I never dug into semantic web before and he made me understand the topic keeping my attention up for the whole speech. Very interesting the discussion after the talk. What would happen if all web data were really interrelated/connected/searchable? What if someone could query the web with something like “tell me all female people against George Bush”? This topic raises questions about our privacy and the power of owning informations rather than mere technical implementation details.
Lisa Todd – Rails Testing with RSpec
Wow, two girls speaking at the same conference! This is a blessing! Beside that, the speech was interesting, well prepared and the topic surely hot.
Just one note: I couldn’t read the code very well on the screen… but it’s an issue many presenters had at this conference. Next time bigger projector please (the font size wasn’t too small).
Ben Scofield – Unleashing the power of Blocks and Procs
I liked Ben talk because many ruby novices have troubles understanding blocks&procs. Pretty clear explanation. He even mentioned my Widgets effort during his speech… what a pleasure! Keep the good job Ben!
Clive Vassel – Model driven development with Hobo and Rails
I’m sorry to say that, but I didn’t like Clive ’s talk at all. I don’t want to be one of those guys who say everything’s fine when it is not. Clive’s speech was boring and didn’t give clear advices or informations. It wasn’t even inspirational. The slideshow was filled with words and statements and he kept reading them like a book. The problem is that attendees could read much faster than he could speak, so basically nobody listened to him. Clive don’t take it personally, I could feel you’re pretty good at what you’re doing, but as a speaker you’ve got to improve a lot (try to read made to stick, it helped me).
Luca Mearelli – Capistrano 2 – beyond hassle free deployment
Luca is a friend so my comments wouldn’t probably be fair. He gave a very pratical and interesting speech about Capistrano 2 and useful techniques to ease your deployments. You can find out examples and the slide show here.
Conclusions
The conference has been worth the money. I sadly couldn’t see all the presentations and I’m sorry I missed Peter Amstrong speech about Rails and Flex2. I bet it has been interesting.
I want to spend a word for the staff that’s been great, you know guys I owe you a beer.
Next year I’ll be there again. For sure.
Socialize it:
Posted in The outer world | Tags railstoitaly | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 03:16:00 GMT
Well, not a great post today but I wanted to report a great video I discovered trough www.presentationzen.com. I hearthly share its content so… go on!
I have a bad relationship with emails. It’s not that I don’t like them but I think that checking the inbox too often is a compulsive action, not a necessity.
I hate those email clients which notify me when a new mail arrives. It’s distracting… it’s totally unproductive… I mean, the power of emails is that you can receive them when you’re offline or busy and you can read them when you want to. I said WHEN YOU WANT TO.
Whenever I find myself hitting F5 on Gmail I feel like a dog waiting for a cookie. And even when people are not compulsively checking their inboxes… they’re probably scanning their past messages in order to organize their days.
Scanning messages over and over again. Not a good practice if you want to get things done.
Are email clients becoming our new to-do managers? Should we spend so much time on our email inbox? Should our lives be email driven?
On this subject Merlin Mann gave us a great presentation inlined here:
Posted by Paolo
Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:29:00 GMT
Are you interested in Rails Workshops, training courses, or related events around the world and you don’t know how to find them?
Geoffrey Grosenbach (author of great peepcode screencasts and many other things) has set up rubyonrailsworkshops.com, a calendar for Ruby on Rails events. You can subscribe to your country’s RSS feed and finally stay up to date with interesting stuff happening near you.
Thanks Geoffrey for adding our workshop too!
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Posted in The outer world | Tags Ruby On Rails, workshop | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:20:00 GMT
It’s a pleasure for us to announce the Jacopo (SeeSaw’s president) and Nadia’s wedding!
They got married on June 9, 2007 and are now in a sweet honeymoon where we bet there is nothing but tenderness and pleasure :-).
SeeSaw wishes them the best and promises to let them live their love without stressing too much…
Would be nice if you readers could express your wishes here as comments!
Well done big J!
Socialize it:
Posted in The outer world | Tags jacopo, married, murador, wedding | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:13:00 GMT
A fellow Ruby developer has just published a brand new weblog: A Tempest of Thoughts.
Giovanni is a great developer and a big contributor in the Italian Ruby community. What is this blog about? Enterpreneurship, software development, Italian business opportunities and of course a fair dose of geek stuff.
Giovanni is also the author of Tuziro: The web dragon and the great RGestPay an ecommerce library for Banca Sella’s GestPay.
This goes in my reader’s subscriptions without a doubt. Check it out!
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Posted in The outer world, Web | Tags intini, rgestpay, tempest, tuziro | no comments | no trackbacks
