Why the hype?

We, at Webreakstuff, just gave birth to our youngest baby: TotSpot (yeah, pun intended).

TotSpot is a publishing platform designed to make it easier to parents to organize and share their tot’s life. Dads and moms of the world can write up journal entries about the toddler’s day-to-day life, upload pictures, link to videos on YouTube and Vimeo and document “firsts” as well as “favorites”. You know, kids’ stuff.

It was built on Ruby on Rails and uses MySQL. On the presentation layer, we use Yahoo!’s User Interface Library on a couple of things including the grids CSS and the little calendar widget for date picking.

Don’t take this for granted, but I think sometime soon we may end up writing a couple of technical posts either on TotSpot’s blog or wherever else about decisions we took or problems/solutions we found while working on TotSpot. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you happen to have a baby, give it a spin.

It seems that this is hitting the web all over again and since I don’t have a lot of time to write about something useful right now, I tried the magic line just to find out something I already knew:

1. I love Ruby, Rake and Textmate
2. We still use Subversion over here – slowly moving to git, though
3. Rails, Rails, Rails: script/server, script/console, svn and rake are the tools of the trade

The raw output:

[tpinto@brokenbones:~] history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  80 ruby
  78 svn
  58 cd
  41 ls
  35 rake
  33 script/server
  19 sudo
  16 script/console
  15 ssh
  15 mate

this is a portuguese post about a portuguese event, the usual english babbling will be back in a bit

Há quase duas semanas, lançámos uma formação em Rails para o público em geral.
Para quem queira aprender a trabalhar com esta framework é uma óptima oportunidade. Para quem já sabe Ruby/Rails, o 3º dia pode ser interessante ao nível do deployment, scaling e outros tópicos avançados.

A formação será nos dias 19, 20 e 21 de Maio em Coimbra, no Hotel Tryp.

Há descontos para estudantes ou para quem queira comparecer nos 3 dias. Mais informações no site do evento: http://training.webreakstuff.com/

This last weekend, over at Webreakstuff, we spent 2 whole days hacking around with both hardware and software. Being web developers we write a lot of code on our regular work days, which leads to a few hacks here and there. Still, it’s always fun to play with things that we usually don’t mess with. And that’s what we did this last weekend.

Circuit bending

This was one of the things have always been curious to learn and play with, and now we know why: it is so much fun! We toke apart a little playing guitar (that I “borrowed” from a cousin) and rewired every single solder point that made it change its sound.
Pedro is the responsible for every single distortion or unplanned sound that comes from that guitar. It’s not finished yet but it will be soon. Maybe I’ll update this post later to include pictures of it (inside and outside), videos and sounds of a live performance.

Processing

Processing has always amazed us. You can use it to write visual applications without much hassle. It is written in Java and you’re writing Java code but the cool thing is you don’t notice it – you don’t need to mess with classes, JApplet and such things, unless you really want or need to. Using the proMIDI library, I interfaced Processing and a MIDI controller to build an etch-a-sketch using knobs (that move the cursor) and pads (to clear the screen). Small thing, I know. Useless? I agree.

But these are the kind of things that can get you introduced to a new language, a library, a technology or something else you wanna know about.

Pure data

Just before the end of Sunday, I found myself watching some videos of people playing music with Pure data. Downloaded it and almost no time after installing it, I was sending MIDI signals to it and converting them into sound. Couldn’t play much more with it but I definitely will in my spare time.

All summed up, these were great times. In two days I was able to learn a lot of things. It’s always good when you divert from what you do everyday to learn new things and explore new worlds. Even when you get back to your work it seems better, just like your old bed when you came back from Summer camp. Everyone is looking forward to repeat this with some more people ;) Circuit bending, general electronics, Processing, Arduino. Interested?

This might be enough for everyone. Talk about storage, uh!?