Not-so-random things you need to know about:
So Ty and I submitted our startup project's pitch to the Amazon Startup Challenge last night. Wish us luck!
The idea (currently implemented as a working prototype, albeit with a number of rough edges) has to do with micropatronage, a concept that is near and dear to my heart. In a nutshell we believe that content authors should be rewarded for their efforts, and we think we're on to a way to make that fun and rewarding for patrons too.
It's something we've been developing on and off for months now, in between various other client gigs and open source initiatives. We have no illusions about being chosen (although it sure would be nice if we were!), but if nothing else the contest has given us the kick in the butt that we needed to get back on track with it and formalize a number of principles in writing. Writing things down, and trying to explain them to people whom you've never met before, always helps to clarify your vision. It's quite amazing, really.
Anyway, I love seeing contests like this, even when I don't win (which is most of the time). I thoroughly enjoyed my role as an organizer of the Rails Rumble event we ran in September, and I look forward to similarly-minded events like the upcoming BlitzWeekend (hi Heri!), and even the more VC-involved "contests" like Seedcamp and of course Y Combinator.
I particularly enjoy following startup contests and events where creativity is a key factor; where instead of just implementing a common spec to see who can do it fastest or "best", teams are actually challenged to invent something totally new, implement it, throw it against a wall and see if it sticks. Hey, now that's entrepreneurial; it's brave, it's somewhat reckless (in it's purest form, anyway), and it's a great way to hatch new disruptive ideas in front of a live audience.
Some of the projects will be great, most of them will suck, but everyone will learn something. It's important to remember, too, that the "winning" team won't necessarily be the long term winner -- it's a distance running event, not a short sprint. In the end, it's all about development -- and I mean that in the personal growth sense, not in the geeks-behind-glass sense.
Of course, you don't need a contest or money or really anything at all to go invent something new, especially these days when launching a company doesn't cost anything more than the skills, free time, and a VPS. But sometimes a little extra motivation goes a long way.
For anyone who's registered (and presumably in or around the greater Boston area), don't forget that JQueryCamp is tomorrow! I'll be there, and looking forward to talks by John Resig, Yehuda Katz (whom I probably owe a beer), and many others.
Someone rings my cell phone at 7AM this morning and asks "is this Nicholas"? I answer "yes", because well, that's my name. Then they hang up.
Apparently I'm not the only one this has happened to. Isn't it good to know that there are communities for just about everything on teh Interwebs, including strange paranoia-inducing phone spam? But just who the fsck are these people anyway, and what in the world was the purpose of that? Sigh.
In unrelated but positive news, the Sox destroyed the Indians last night 11 to 2, winning the ALCS. Yes, I am a fair weather fan.
Any post about Git pretty much mandates the use of some lame pun in the title, and this blog entry is no exception. For those of you who are as-of-yet unfamiliar with it, Git is a distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds. It's been around and usable for about a year now, but I'd only been peripherally aware of it until recently.
In the past I've just used it to check out and occaisionally toy with the latest Rubinius sources but now that the Offtrac project is using it, it finally looks like I'm going to have to start familiarizing myself with it beyond installation and cloning a remote repository. If that sounds negative it isn't meant to be; I enjoy being forced to learn new things every once in a while. Srsly.
[To be honest I'm still relatively happy with Subversion, but hey, when I started using Subversion I was still at least relatively happy with CVS too. No wait, scratch that, I hated CVS.]
Anyway, for those of you out there like me who are just getting acquainted with Git and particularly those who are stumbling over the implications of the distributed part of distributed version control, Carl Worth has written a useful getting started guide that you should definitely check out. Of course there's the official user guide too.
In practice, normal usage really isn't as different as it seems, and the concept of a distributed repository is a truly powerful one. Everyone has commit access to their own local branch, which means most operations are fast, and the centralized who-gets-commit-rights question becomes a total non-issue. That's very very cool. Oh, and no .svn folders littered in every folder is another nicety. The jury's still out for me as of right now, which is to say I'm not rushing to switch all my existing Subversion projects over just yet. But I have to say, I'm very intrigued so far.
Things have been kind of crazy lately, and blog updates have been few and far between. Sorry about that, it's not that I've run out of things to say. Honest.
The truth of the matter is I've just been really busy with a couple client projects, and some other goodies that I'll (hopefully) be writing about soon. And oh, yeah, I'm getting married this weekend too ;-).
So actually, the answer to the titular question is Martha's Vineyard, where my lovely wife-to-be and I are renting a house for the week. It's great to get away from (almost) everything for a little while.
Check it out: a Preview Release of Rails 2.0 was made available yesterday. Things are "almost finished" and this is an opportunity for folks (who haven't been following edge closely) to get a taste of what's new before the final release. To install the gem:
gem install rails --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org
Or you can freeze edge using the tag "rel2-0-0PR". Make sure to check out that post (linked above) to read about all the good stuff.
Note that 1.2.4 will also be released prior to 2.0 and will include a variety of bugfixes as well as the final deprecation warnings for upgrading an application to 2.0. Big thanks to the whole core team (and all the contributors) for their excellent work.