[Rails] Introduce yourself and your project -- Round 2

[Curt Hibbs]

On December 14th, 2004 David Heinemeier Hansson sent this to the mailing
list:

  I'm seeing a lot of new names on the list. Could
  we perhaps do a round of introductions? That would
  also be a great first post, if you haven't had a
  chance to contribute yet. The basics should include
  your name, your organization, your country and city,
  and the project you're currently working on.

Its been a couple months since then (ancient history in Rails-time), I'm
updating my Rails presentation, and I'd like to include some information
about what is being done with Rails.

Below I listed all of the responses from the first round. If your response
is no longer current, please post a correction. If you missed the first
round of introductions, please use this as an excuse to let everyone know
what you are doing.

Thanks,
Curt

PS
  Note to Bob Sidebotham: Yes, I remember punched cards & paper tape!  :-)


======= First Round Posts =======

David Heinemeier Hansson,
Working with 37signals
Live in Copenhagen, Denmark, but are working with
people in Chicago, US
Basecamp and the forthcoming Writeboard

=======

Scott Barron
Doing rails stuff for Ohio University
Live in Athens, Ohio
Public projects:
  Elite Journal
  Recipe Box

As far as work related projects at OU go, I've got applications that
handle things as simple as a student employee schedule, to an app that
creates and maintains a schedule of movies for the university's movie
channel, to an app that maintains and handles billing for the dining
hall, and a few more along those lines.  All future projects here will
be developed in rails and several of our PHP projects have been ported
to rails.

=======

Pelle Brændgaard
Working independently on a range of crypto and financial applications.
Live permanently in Panama City, Panama but am temporarily in
Copenhagen, Denmark.

Working on a "topsecret" project using Rails and a range of opensource
java code.

=======

Johan Sörensen
Currently a freelancer/consultant
Living in the south of sweden at the moment, currently looking for
work that'd allow me to use Rails (of course ;)) in one way or
another.

On the subject of public personal Rails projects I have Collaboa,
which is a communitywikiforumthingie I've created for the swedish mac
dev site http://cocoa.se. There is a Trac install available at
http://collaboa.cocoa.se/trac if anyone wants to have a peek...

=======

Demetrius Arraes Nunes
Working on my masters degree in PUC-RJ, Brazil
I also work on my own e-learning start-up company: Interface Ltd
(http://www.interface-ti.com.br) (we use .NET there, for now... ;-) )
I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
My masters degree is about a web modeling technique called OOHDM (Object
Oriented Hypermedia Design Method) that was "invented" by my professor,
Daniel Schwabe (Phd-UCLA), some 10 years ago, that adds a distinct
"navigational modeling" step in the development cycle. In this step, you
map conceptual objects to navigational objects, define navigational
contexts, indexes, links, anchors and other navigational primitives. I
am developing a application that is the same time the modeling
environment (using OOHDM) and the resulting application itself in a kind
o wiki-like mode where you can edit not only the data, but also the
model (and metamodel).
The last (and HUGE) step in my project is to port the MySql
implementation to a RDF database called Sesame, and that means porting
ActiveRecord from relational to semantic/rdf. God (and please, David!)
help me... :-O My deadline is februrary 28th. I am already done with 80%
of the relational version.

=======

Chris McGrath
Currently freelance contractor based in Dublin, Ireland working on VB
and ASP Stuff (urgh)
Looking to find work in Rails, or convice my current place to convert
some of thier apps to Rails.
Working on a personal finance style application as a means of learning
Rails and getting rid of GnuCash.
I'm hoping to contribute something to the project in the new year,
even if it's just a couple of minor bugfixes :)

=======

Peter Johansson
Working as consultant for a large Fortune 500 company
Live and work in Stockholm, Sweden

Just beginning to learn Rails (and Ruby) on my spare time and have
planned to convert a couple of PHP-based apps to Rails. Previously
I've worked most with PHP, Perl and Java.

=======

Dale Hawkins
Denver (Littleton), Colorado, US

I have written a couple utilities (a worklog/billing application), and
I am working on porting a large, ugly php application used by
government agents (no kidding).  The backend DB is sybase (oh, joy!
:-( ), so I've been working on a sybase adapter whenever I get around
to it.  (But I have another job and kids, so progress is very slow
much of the time).

I've been meaning to start a software project management tool using
rails.  Along the lines of trac but with some scheduling, resource
tracking, and support for story card/use case design.

=======

Marcel Molina Jr.
"Doing rails stuff for" Simon's Rock College, a small liberal arts college
in
the wilds of Massachusetts that accepts "gifted" students into college two
years earlier than usual
I live in The Berkshires, South Western Massachusetts

Currently working on an online admissions application, errr, application
so that prospective students can apply to the college online. Also writing
an application to register student/faculty/staff machines on the network.
Planning on porting all (or most) existing web applications to Rails.
Moving toward doing pretty much *everything* here with Rails (if web
related) or Ruby if not, when appropriate (which is most of the time).

noradio on the #rubyonrails channel, much to david's distress.

=======

Jarkko Laine
Student, athlete and entrepreneur
Graduating from Tampere University of Technology (hopefully) next year
Running my own company, O'Design
Live and prosper in Tampere, Finland (that's next to Nokia, people)
Working on my first commercial Rails project at the moment (a simple
CMS)
As a personal project I'm developing a Basecamp for athlete groups and
trainers, including training diary etc...
jarkko (surprise?) at #rubyonrails

=======

Hello, my name is Steve Kellock and I'm a Rails junkie.
what-a-day on IRC #rubyonrails
Indy Developer
Barrie (just north of Toronto), Canada

- Completed a sales application for a client.
- Currently working on a
sports-team-management-extranet-type-of-app-thingy (it'd be a lot
clearer with screen shots).
- Have a few projects lined up for 2005... guess what I'm going to
write them with?  (hint: it's not DOS batch files)

=======

Kevin Evans, University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK

Currently working on a Rails based blogging application for the
(http://www.glam.ac.uk) University. Very close to going live, just
struggling with fcgi stability :-(

regards
Kevin Evans
IS Development Manager

=======

Tanner Burson
Live in the great state of Oklahoma in the US.

Learning rails in my spare time, for my own personal projects at the
moment.  Currently writing a multi-user task list of sorts.  Hoping to
eventually find a client willing to take the plunge as well

=======

Austin Moody
MedAlliance Management Group - a small physician consulting firm in
Johnson City, Tennessee.
Completely rewritten our old electronic health claims manager in
Rails/Ruby from PHP/Python.  Also created a custom intranet portal
manager and a few other small specialized apps.
austinetsu on #rubyonrails

=======

I'm Rick Bradley, working as 1 of 4 people (2 developers - the other
developer is also on this list) at Base Systems (www.basesys.com) here
in Nashville, TN.  We're deploying a few new products for the medical
industry (Asterisk-based voice recording systems, handheld applications,
etc.) and will be converting our medical workflow system (currently
serving transcription providers) from PHP to Ruby and Rails over the
next few months.

Since our company is so small we're heavy into magnifying our
productivity.  We've looked at (best estimate) close to 100 different
frameworks in multiple languages over the past year and only Rails
appears to actually reduce the amount of work we have to do.

I'm also gradually converting my various personal toys over to using
Rails as well -- I started with the DemoApp accountomatic which is
working very well for me since porting it over to Rails.  Next is
probably my jukebox system (rdtj.sourceforge.net), which looks like it
will end up being Ruby+Madeleine+RGL+FreeBASE+Rails.

=======

- Sascha Ebach
- Entrepeneur
- Living in Troisdorf Germany, which is right in between of Cologne and
Bonn.
- MCMS which stands for Magical Content Management Solution
MCMS will a try to make a cms that ppl want to actually use, but
nevertheless will have a lot of functionality. It will be magical and it
will be open source.

ROADMAP
=======
* Unique concentration on usability, web standards and accessibility
* Contentrepository as a tree, so you will be able easily extend the
functionality of a corporate website to a blog with comments, a forum, a
shop, a whatever. Something along the lines of ezpublish and drupal.
* Versioning
* WYSIWYG editing (with FCKEditor, which I find amazing)
* different views and the administration, so new users and powerusers
can feel at home
* Maybe even edit-in-place, like you can see in Bitflux CMS, or LIMB.
But I am uncertain about that as I think edit in place is not always the
most generally applicable solution, esp. if you wanna have a cms which
handles
* multiple diffrent websites under one adminstration
* media repository
* make it possible to turn it in a hostable solution (this one will
probably by closed source)
* lots of other things

Current progress is 10%. As I am working on this alone, have a business
to run (where I can not always program in ruby) and my family to care
about, progress is not going to be very fast. Hopefully it will be
something usable within the next 6-12 months. If luck strikes me and if
what they say about rails is true, than it might be earlier ;)

As soon as I have something usable I will create an enironment where
collaboration is possible. If you wanna help, please wait a little while
until I get my act together. Which (I feel sometimes) could never happen
;) I will announce it on this list.

=======

Sean Leach
Ventura, CA
irc: kicker

Working on several personal projects with rails.  RSS feed aggregator,
stat management application as well a small ecommerce app, probably
won't finish any of them :)

I do 99% of my work in Python when I can, and will continue to do so,
but Rails is by far the best web framework I have used (and I guarantee
I have used/built apps with pretty much all of them from the PHP ones to
the Java ones etc.).  To be honest, I wish there was a Python on Rails
like has been discussed.  Ruby is a fine language, but I know Python in
and out and prefer it over Ruby (please do not begin a language war).

=======

Jim Weirich
Consultant for Compuware,
Currently working on-site at a LARGE financial company
Java programmer by day, Ruby programmer by night (and some day too!)
Rails Projects:
* Storycards -- XP like planning tool
* Misc prototypes
Non-Rails Ruby Projects
* Rake -- Ruby's version of Make
* RubyGems -- Packaging software

=======

Lee Marlow
IRC: mecraw
Denver (Highlands Ranch), CO, USA

So far I'm just a Ruby/Rails voyeur.  I became interested when Dave Thomas
mentioned Ruby at a Java conference.  I hope to do some personal projects in
Rails, maybe my wedding site.  Hopefully Rails makes web development easy
enough for a backend Java developer.

=======


Jason Alexander Hoffman
PhD scientist at the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomic
Master configurer behind TextDrive
Live in La Jolla California, and am lucky to work with people who are
everywhere

NIFG is all perl, java, python (in that order) and some ruby (me) but
no Rails (yet?)
My personal pet project is a bioinformatics web app in Rails.
And I dream at night of a end-user hosting "control panel" in Rails.

=======

Jason Alexander Hoffman
PhD scientist at the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomic
Master configurer behind TextDrive
Live in La Jolla California, and am lucky to work with people who are
everywhere

NIFG is all perl, java, python (in that order) and some ruby (me) but
no Rails (yet?)
My personal pet project is a bioinformatics web app in Rails.
And I dream at night of a end-user hosting "control panel" in Rails.

=======

I'm Sam Stephenson; 20 years old, unemployed, on leave from Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, and currently living in Chicago, IL, US. A
recent evaluation has demonstrated that I'm not really good at
anything, but that doesn't keep me from enjoying Rails.

I live for Ruby, I'm a huge fan of domain-specific languages, and I
get really excited by introspection and all the stuff that comes with
it. I like to build small things out of even smaller things.

I have a tendency to create projects and leave them unmaintained. As a
subscriber to the Rails list, ou may have encountered two of those:
Prick[1], an IRC quote application written in Rails, and Paginator
Helper[2]. If you use Gtk+, there's also my Gtk::MDI[3] library, which
suffers the same fate.

I contribute trivial patches to Rails when I can.

My current project is Timber, a Rails application for Web magazines.
It lets authors and editors collaborate on articles and makes it easy
to lay out content. It's similar to Textpattern[4] but significantly
simpler. I'm also playing around with an interactive Web-based
debugger for Rails which adds a live irb console to your error pages
with XMLHttpRequest.

You can almost always find me on #rubyonrails as sam-.

=======

I'm Joe Van Dyk.  I've been playing around with Ruby for about six
months, and Rails about a month.  Neat stuff.

My "real job" is working for the Integrated Defense Systems division
of Boeing.  My recent project there has been using Ruby for a GUI to
view and control simulations.  As far as I know, I'm the only person
at Boeing to use Ruby for anything, but hopefully that will change!

I'm also developing a real estate site using Rails.  Can't wait until
0.9 comes out.

=======

I am: Bob Sidebotham
Vancouver, Canada

After spending 30 years writing software in various guises (anyone
remember punched cards and paper tape?), I had pretty much burned out.
I spent the last several years looking for another vocation. I've had
some minor successes, such as an exhibit of hand-processed b&w
photographs--which I've since webified at
http://windsong.bc.ca/alonetogether). Recently, however, I discovered
Ruby, and my interest in software was re-kindled.

Several years ago, I wrote the software for managing a small home
delivery business that provides organic produce and groceries. I'm
currently considering rewriting that now ancient system in Rails. It
has to deal with the whole gamut of processes, including inventory
management, supplier ordering, customer relations, customer ordering,
warehouse operations, delivery routing, accounting, billing, and
others.

Ruby and Rails look like they will provide a good foundation for
creating a maintainable--maybe even elegant--system for this business.

=======

Samuel Kvarnbrink
Lives in Umeå, Sweden. Working part-time as a system administrator at
the university of Umeå, otherwise a freelance developer.

Freelance: Working with the Umeå Krio Corpus, which is a Rails app
that's used for managing and analyzing texts written in the Krio
language for a research project. Krio, which is an Anglo-African Creole
language spoken in various parts of West Africa, uses some phonetic
characters for extra vowels and therefore the entire collection (which
is HUGE and growing!) is encoded using UTF-16. I've implemented a very
fast text scanner in C that interfaces with Oniguruma, and Rails is
used to provide a good frontend for it and handle the DB part.

Day job: Working on a _huge_ administrative application for HUMlab, a
computer lab for people from all disciplines (but with main focus on
the humanities). The app will manage/create user accounts, handle all
courses held in the lab (and follow-up surveys), handle reservations,
provide an interface for an SNMP-based print quota system (which i
wrote in Ruby, of course) and a lot of other stuff. The app basically
contains of three components: a Rails frontend, an AR-powered utility
that handles/creates accounts in OpenLDAP, and the print quota system
(also AR-powered).

The app is currently in alpha/planning stage, but will replace a less
maintainable CGI-based Ruby system I wrote a while ago. It's going to
be a _lot_ of work, but due to the efficiency of Rails I'm estimating
it to be much less cumbersome than maintaining and developing the old
app.

=======

Michael Koziarski
Live in Wellington New Zealand.
Working for a Bank,  Java by day ruby by night.
No public rails projects yet,  but something's in the works.

=======

Robert Bousquet
Front-end developer at the University of Southern California
Currently re-skinning the USC Scholar's Portal front-end and working on
the USC Digital Archive
Daydreaming about building Rails apps instead.
Also running freelance gig, Debut Web Design.

=======

I'm Jens-Christian Fischer working at my company InVisible GmbH in Zurich,
Switzerland.
Our main line of business are intranet applications for large companies
(in Lotus Notes mainly)

I have 13+ years of Lotus Notes experience and always dabbled in languages
on the side (Pascal, Modula-2, Smalltalk, C (argh), C++ (AAARRRGGG), Java,
awk, Perl, Python and now Ruby

I have several other companies/projects (neural-network stock trading [1],
p2p email [2] and a semi-secret mud/mush inspired [3] rails project that I
hope to have live in the next few weeks.

[1] http://www.ivorix.com
[2] http://www.zappatanetworks.com
[3] http://amuda.ch

=======

Jeff Moss
Sandy, Utah, USA (Salt Lake City suburbia)
Currently attending University of Utah for a bachelors in business
administration.
Day Job: work for a long distance reseller, www.americom.com, where I am
the only developer employed. Currently overhauling entire website to
move it out of the early 90's era, convinced boss to do it in rails, the
best framework that I've ever investigated, by a long shot. I believe I
have David to thank?
Previous experience has been Perl and PHP, and before that I messed
around in C/C++. In my free time I play with other languages and am one
of you who starts many projects and finishes few to none due to other
invasive interests, although my current project, an ebay tool that
interfaces with their xml web services, has actually come quite far and
appears to be finishable, assuming the demons don't take me first.

=======

Tobias Lütke
Stranded German in Ottawa, Canada

Currently I'm doing contract and some consulting work as well as
several own commercial and private projects.
100% Of my payed work is done in Rails at this point, i'm one of the lucky
few.
My best known project is probably http://www.snowdevil.ca , a
full-fledged e-commerce system
build on rails which hopefully hits its next milestone soon by selling
some bloody snowboards.

Apart from snowdevil i have been working on Hieraki a collaborative
book writing tool reusing proven concepts from wikis and tools like
them. Hieraki has been progressing well and will probably receive a
real announcement soon as it will be released under the MIT license.

My background is mainly static languages like c and c++ and
unfortunately some java as well.
After about 10 years of those you have seen it all...

Ruby rocks !

=======

Hi, I'm Dan Peterson (danp in #rubyonrails) from Yuma, AZ. I work for
the Yuma Educational Consortium which is comprised of the local high
school district and one of the two elementary districts in the area as
well as other various entities.

I've been using Ruby for mainly procedural text-processing for about
four years now and I still do a lot of text data conversion and
manipulation with it every day. I'm blown away by Rails and how well
it all works together. I started out using it trying to write a new
accounts system with linkage to our two payroll systems. That was a
bit ambitious so I've put that on hold and am working on an app for
tracking patches to our Oracle-based student information system and am
having a lot of fun tinkering with it and especially trying out the
new features that will appear in 0.9.

I can't wait to implement more things for my customers with Rails;
both to help them and to let me have fun doing it! :)

=======

Michel Rasschaert from Paris, France.

I learn the basics of a lot of programming languages as a hobby (too
many to write here) and I was very soon interested in Ruby. But it
really is rails that made me use it for real at last.

Professionally I work for a bank doing Delphi work and hopefully
migrating to Java and introducing some XP concepts (testing,
continuous integration, IoC, etc.) but it's hard.

In my spare time (not a lot regretfully) I work on a personal finance
application on rails :)

=======

I've been doing PHP development for 8 years but have just falled in
love with Rails. I am currently a senior Physics major attending Reed
College in Portland, Oregon.

Rails Projects:
----------------------
The Conjuring Cabaret - http://magic.rufy.com/
My first project was to port the first site I created (back in 1996) to
Rails from an ugly PHP/MySQL setup. The new version has 752 LOC and is
much more customizable.

Web Collaborator - http://webcollaborator.com/ (in progress)
Again a port, but this time from a homebrewed MVC PHP backend to Rails.
It has taken 8 hours to port 90% of the site to Rails compared to the
two months of scattered development it took for the original site to be
put together. Including libraries (like Smarty), the PHP version had 30
KLOCs. Including Rails code, the Rails version has 3 KLOCs (~600 lines
of non-Rails code). This has been a HUGE improvement and will vastly
speed up development time for this project. The Rails version should be
up before the new year.

PATA - http://pataweb.net/
I am in charge of revamping this site and have decided to do it with
Rails.

Reed College
I am going to be building various internal utility pages for Reed
College's web presence with Rails.

=======

My name is Sarah Wedde and I live in Petone, New Zealand.

I'm currently trying to decrapify my weblog thingamy
(http://onebefore.org/), make myself an application that will totally
organise my life and fold my laundry, and I'm having a bit of a play around
with something to make use of the OpenSource Shakespeare database I
downloaded during a bout of procrastination.

=======

My namie is Shyam Gopale and I live in Pune, India.

Currently using rails for developing a web based portal
for a friend. New to both Ruby and Rails. In my day job
I develop "Identity Management" products.

=======

Curt Sampson
CTO, tabemo.com
Tokyo, Japan

I'm building a (mostly mobile) website for time-based restaurant
discounts (e.g., better discounts when the restaurant is not busy).
Currently I'm battling my way out of PHP and MySQL hell, legacy of
a previous IT administration here.

Previously I was Chief Architect at vanten.com, where my main project
was an enterprise management system for a national wireless ISP in
Japan. That was Java on top of PostgreSQL, and while PostgreSQL can
compete with the best of them, it increased my frustrations with Java
to the point I started looking for a new language.

=======

Name:  Jens Himmelreich
What:  Working at hanke multimediahaus (www.hmmh.de),
       Ruby/Rails voyeur
Where: Living in Bremen, Germany
Work:  ecommerce-Websites (e.g. www.bonprix.de)

=======

Name: Magnus Bodin
Employer: IBM
Country, City: Sweden, Malmö

Current project: Private Web project, will be public 2005Q1

We are currently two rails-fans at the IBM-office in Malmö.
I hope that this will lead to something in the future.

========

Who:   Stefano Cobianchi
Where: Milan, Italy
What:  Using Ruby everywhere I can (currently it powers the server-side
       of our email-marketing application); trying to promote Rails
       as a replacement for our ugly home-brewed PHP frameworks (urgh)
Why:   Well, given the choice among PHP, Java and Ruby, what would a
       sane person do? :-)

=======

Erno Mononen
Living in  Jyväskylä, Finland

Developing sustainability  management  software using Java,  new  both
to Ruby and Rails.  I've been experimenting with Rails for couple
weeks now and I have to say I'm really impressed by the productivity
boost that  it offers. Looking for opportunities to use it in my daily
work.

======= End =======