SeeSaw's blog: Category The outer world

A change of season

Jacopo Murador — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:46:00 -0500

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!

RailsToItaly report

Paolo — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:32:00 -0500

From RailsToItaly07

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.

Email inbox is not a todo-list!

Paolo — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:16:00 -0500

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:

Hope you like it as much as I do. Enjoy!

Looking for Rails workshops around the world?

Paolo — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:29:00 -0500

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!

Jacopo has (finally) married!

Paolo — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:20:00 -0500

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!

A Tempest of Thoughts

Paolo — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:13:00 -0500

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!

Rome Barcamp

Michele — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:15:00 -0600

We could say It’s for seeing the colosseum or for enjoying the warm temperature our capital is experiencing during these days… or just because we’re going to meet old good friends… but the truth is we’re having a trip to Rome mainly to talk with passionate professionals. We won’t be touring or visiting. Just brain-storming and sharing ideas with great people.

Emotions have witched us again, so this Saturday we’re attending the first Barcamp of the year, in beautiful Rome; Will we see you there??

The Truth about Productivity

Paolo — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:55:00 -0600

Nice readings are: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve, How to shut up and get to work, Clicker trained by our email.

Does it matter to be good looking?

Paolo — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 05:35:00 -0600

Ducati 999

Brand new Ducati 1098

Hi guys, we’re starting to work on our own first web project. All of us have a technical backgroud so we’re culturally not inclined to fancy screens or nice designs. Of course our all-technical approach is wrong. I should say it used to be wrong as we’re changing our minds. Even if you’re doing something inherently great, you do need a good looking interface.

Take a look to the two motorbikes from Ducati. The left one is the well-known 999, a very succesful bike that has won a plentiful of races and has proven itself as a very appreciated piece of cutting edge technology. Even being so successful, it’s not awesome. Yeah, I know, it’s a personal opinion. You need to be a pro to understand how sophisticate its suspension or braking system is, but even a kid would say ‘I just don’t like it!’.

To the right you can see the brand new 1098, the 999’s successor. No matter how technically good the 1098 will be, all of the people I know think it’s plain cool. It doesn’t even have to prove that’s good, because people just fall in love with it. If people like it, people try it, people talk about it (like I’m doing right now). This makes buzz, the product gains momentum and I’d bet it will sell better than the previous one. Remember that not only good riders have the money to buy a great bike but also emotional kids do. With this great appeal all kids of the block will want to have a 1098. If something is visually appealing people are more inclined to discover what’s under the cover.

What does this mean to us and our project? We’re just spending a lot of our time on user interface usability and graphic appeal in order to lower the psychological barrier to its adoption. I hope to show you nice screenshots soon, and hear thoughts about them.

Take care and drive safe.

[OT] Health & Blood Donations

Paolo — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 12:18:00 -0600

Hey guys, sorry for this off topic post but I really want to spread the word…

Our job as software developers is often stressful and fast paced, and being in a startup does not help at all. It might happen that you feel tired or lazy and even working 10 to 12 hours a day doesn’t make you productive as you’d like to be.

Get rid of the phone for a while, get rid of instant messengers and stop checking your emails too often. Nobody’s ever dead just because you were offline for a couple of hours. Try to get your job done and spare a few hours to take care of yourself. Be healthy and happy, that’s the best you can do to improve your productivity.

Giving blood is an example of how you can do something socially useful while keeping yourself under control. They check your blood every time you donate. How many of you do a blood check on a regular basis?

There’s a constant need of new volunteers, so don’t be shy and do something for you and the community!

In Italy you can contact Avis, in UK the national blood service and in the US the American Red Cross. Don’t forget that you’re more important than the code you write.

Happy blood-giving :-)

Interested in startup management?

Paolo — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 12:15:00 -0500

Hi guys, if you’re interested in startup management and wanna know how to switch your programmer brain to an entrepreneur one, add the Ian Landsman’s weblog to your reading list.

It’s a nice reading because he’s experienced and his advices are “from normal people to normal people”. That’s valuable because often startups try to emulate great companies like 37signals forgetting we’re not all smart programmers as DHH or marketing gurus as 37’s Jason Fried.

How to sell fluff to James Gosling...

Paolo — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:54:00 -0500

The JavaJournal blog has just published an article on how I sold a funny T-Shirt to James Gosling at the last Italian JavaConference. We had a lot of fun there with the JUG Padova guys… nice to see someone remember the great gig I did :D

JavaJournal is a brand new magazine about Java and Software development. It’s very hard to set up magazines like this in Italy but it seems those guys are motivated and the whole story looks really promising!

I wish you the best JavaJournalers!!! ...and who knows, I could find myself writing for them sooner or later…

Finally we've got it!

Michele — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:35:00 -0500

Against all odds and ‘fish & chips’ we are comfortably sit infront of David Heinemeier Hansson, attending the first european RailsConf

:-O

Amazing!!

Northeastern Ruby Social Club - Meetup #1

Paolo — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:12:05 -0500

Yesterday night we have been at the first Northeastern Ruby Social Club Meetup, held in beautiful Padova. We had a great time with the ruby-it guys and dugg a handful of topics swimming from startups to rails and its (maybe too early?) adoption in enterprise enviroments.

The dinner was great and informal. It’s always nice to meet with smart people, and the great thing is that ruby seems to attract constantly more and more of them.

It’s not unknown our commitment to help building strong communities such as JUG Padova.

Hope this repeats soon!

Startup: are we supposed to have an office?

Paolo — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:19:00 -0500

Being a promising startup, we’re facing the problem of having office space. Here in Italy most companies won’t trust startups that do not have an office. It’s just matter of culture. They just think how good can they be if they cannot even afford a lousy apartment?.

That’s not the point. Or, well, it is the point but you should face it from another point of view.

We’re three people, used to work like animals. We’ve been working together for many months and each one of us has set up a pretty confortable desk and work-space in his own house. We’ve got high quality broadband connectivity at home that let us work during the night (how long will we keep having a daily job?).

We spent so many hours chatting and conferencing we actually don’t see why we should spend money to have an office. We can already be highly productive working this way.

I should point out a few other things that are pushing us in this direction…

We do usually get together for lunch or dinner, so we can discuss face-to-face
We make heavy use of web collaboration tools, not all people feel comfortable with them
We’re not currently hiring
Our applications are hosted so we do not need to take care of our own hardware or other physical stuff
We like the freedom of working or resting at any time (even if we always end up working way too much)
We do not care about the typical Italian prejudice :-)

That said, we aren’t going to have an office at the moment. Maybe someone else has already faced this dilemma in Italy. We’d be glad to hear advices from them!

C’mon! Let us know what you think!

I’m about to take a nap now… after all, it’s just a few steps away :-D