Posts Tagged ‘development’

Hupskadee

April 28th, 2009

When, about 3 weeks ago, Hendrik asked me if I felt like joining their team to develop an application for the INCA-awards. I knew Patrick and Hendrik to be competent, enthousiastic and just the right amount of crazy, so I agreed immediately.

So we developed Hupskadee. Hupskadee is a kind of doodle, but for babysitters. We imagined tons of extra features, but since we had 3 weeks, we kept to the essentials.

The application is in dutch, since we had to make a choice for the awards … now that I think of it the visual jokes don’t translate that well. In french it still works, since you can call your child mon petit chou. In English, however, I’ve never heard anyone call their offspring sprout or cabbage.

The team was composed of one other more back-end developer (Patrick), one front-end developer/designer/movie-maker (Hendrik), and one graphist-designer (Wio). Maybe more to the point, we had two parents on the team, who could give us an insider’s perspective.

We communicated mostly via Skype, though we did one coding session together at Patrick’s place in the countryside.

Now I’m a hard worker, but I’m not a workaholic by anyone’s definition. Coming home to code some more, 7 days a week, is not my default setting. But for such a short duration it was bearable (my backside and eyesight would disagree). The great team made it nearly pleasant.

Yesterday we handed in a working application. And I’m glad to go back to a more measured pace, to see some friends and to get some fresh air. Hope we can do it again sometime :)

Links on a bleary friday

July 11th, 2008

OpenMokoGhent jazz festival last night, and i’m not at my freshest.
A few interesting links for this week …

Everyone’s raving about the 3G iPhone to the point of stupidity. Before you run to the nearest Apple Mobistar store to be trampled by hordes of frothing fans, consider this: an open source, open hardware (!) phone that has come out last week, and with much less ado: the Neo Freerunner. Nice, no?

Music links of the week: i’ve known radio Resonance for a while now – a maverick London radio playing the weirdest stuff. It ranges from experimental stuff someone made in his garden by beating together bits of wood, cambodjan music from the 20s, to golden oldies from forgotten times.

It turns out they’re not alone: if you want to broaden your musical horizons, and are tired of getting bored with the same old commercial stuff around the clock: WFMU. A user-funded radio – I’ve been told they raise money once a year. Their website gives access to (get this) comprehensive archives. Grassroot treasures like this help regain some faith in mankind (thanks Hendrik).

News that’s already a little bit old, but made me smile: Google being subponaed to deliver 12 Tb of data to Viacom. In paper format. *cough*

A last wee technical tip: i’m a big fan of REST – technique to use a certain type of expressive URL. Say http://myserver.com/users/tom/orders. What you don’t think about is that the data in question (tom) has to have URL-compatible format ! this means that you’re allowed alphabetical characters “-”, “.”,”_”,”~”. But woe upon you if that username contains an @ or an & (and yes, they exist)(ref).

Links on a sort-of summery tuesday

June 10th, 2008

grass under the sunSome links to share today, so i’ll indulge.

If you feel like an activist, or you have a cause to defend (like protesting the closing of your favourite chipshop, or the fact the iphone will not be on sale the 11th of july – these are real life examples), you can set an internet petition in no time thanks to iPetition. Remains to be seen whether an internet petition carries that much weight, but you never know.

To continue in the activist track: dotherightthing.com a forum/groupsblog thingie to discuss companies’ethics. If i understand correctly, news items are added by members, and then given weight (importance) by other members. This is a way to give feedback to said companies.

On a totally different tack, everyone’s who’s doing anything with Rails knows hat version 2.1 is coming out. This has been partly covered in Railscasts, but now a certain Carlos Brando also wrote a free ebook on the subject. Kudos.

You all know OpenID – well, OpenID is under attack from a security point of view: it would be vulnerable to phishing. To be fair, that’s true of any web app – if your DNS is funky, then you’re liable to give out your username and password to any old maffia machine.

OpenID makes this more of a risk in the fact that one password rules them all. But then again, nobody with any ounce of common sense would access his bank account (or other important stuff) with the same password they use for, say, Flickr, or even their mail account.


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