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François Beausoleil and Daniel Haran join GiraffeSoft and our new site launches!November 21 2008

Let's start with the biggest news. This has been a long time in the making. At Rubyfringe, Francois, Daniel, and I had a long conversation about how great it would be if we could work together.

We gave it a shot for Rails Rumble, in which we built what does this error mean. We won for most useful, which we took as a sign that our idea of working together was a good one.

I can't express how excited I am and privileged I feel to be working with François and Daniel. They are truly top notch in every way. Their contributions to open source, previous projects, and resumes speak for themselves.

If you don't know these amazing guys, you can read about François and Daniel on our new site!

The New giraffesoft.ca

Thanks to our good friends over at Arktyp and the awesome Webby framework, we finally have a real website. With plenty of work coming in over the last 14 months or so, I was having a really hard time motivating myself to put a full fledged site together.

Well, now that the team is growing, I final

MoR => open_source_hackfest?November 4 2008

Over the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed Montreal on Rails. There have been lots of awesome presentations, and general good times had by all.

When Carl asked for feedback on Uservoice, a lot of people seemed interested in more presentations geared towards newbies. While presentations can be really interesting and useful, most of the best programmers I know learned their craft through open source work. There’s no better way to improve your skills (not to mention your profile in the industry).

So, I’ve been thinking about organizing a monthly, open source hackfest.

It would be an informal evening where people could come and work on FLOSS. If you have a project, it would be a great place to get help from some of your local ruby gurus, or just an excuse to work on your project. If not, it’d be a great place to pick up a project and learn from other developers.

At the end of every evening, we could have a few lightning talks (5mins), to give people the opportunity to show off what they’ve been working on. Or not, if nobody wants to speak. Only rule: no preparation allowed. No slides. Nothing.

Think of it sort of like Zed Shaw’s Freehacker’s Union, minus the hazing ritual for new members.

So, what do you think? If we turned MoR in to an open source hack fest for a couple of months, would you miss the presentations? Is this something you’re interested in tr

Off-Topic: Café MyriadeOctober 27 2008

I'm a coffee geek. About half my kitchen is dedicated to espresso gear, and various tools for brewing filtered coffee, including a vacuum pot, and the newest addition, a cafe solo. Anyway, being a coffee geek, I also hang out with coffee geeks. And, it just so happens that the guy who taught me everything I know about coffee, competitive barista Anthony Benda, just opened his very own cafe.

If you like coffee, you owe it to yourself to check this place out. There's a huge difference between the <strike>crap</strike>stuff you get at starbucks (which we lovingly refer to as 'dirty water'), or even your local coffee shop, and what they're brewing over at Myriade.

The rest of this article is cross-posted from Daniel Haran's blog.

Daniel and I went to visit Cafe Myriade (praized page) for their Grand Opening. He grabbed this shot after a friendly latte art challenge:

Our Rumble App: What Does this Error Mean?October 19 2008

Francois, Daniel, and I (and Mat, in spirit) spent the weekend rumbling. It was a great time coding with these two superstars, but you don't care about that.

Our app is called what does this error mean?. We all see error messages, and until now, the best way to look for solutions to those error messages was doing a google search. The problem with google searches, though, is that the results are ordered by the quality of the site, not by the quality of the solution. What does this error mean solves that problem, and a few more.

But, really, reading sucks. So, watch our screencast to learn all about wdtem.

Rails & Merb Integration

As part of our rumble project, we built plugins for both rails and merb that override their default development mode error messages. With our plugin installed, you'll see our logo below the error message. Simply click on the logo to automatically jump to a what does this error mean search!

For rails:

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/giraffesoft/what_does_this_error_mean-rails.git

For merb:

sudo gem install what_does_

Watch François Beausoleil Train for Rails RumbleOctober 15 2008

My Rails Rumble team is all set to win, because we trained the hardest. Check out the video François made of some of his hard work preparing for the competition.