Anil’s Weblog

It’s a A List Apart’s survey 2008 for people who make websites. I came to know about this via Abdul’s blog. Questions were really interesting. Do take the survey.

Checkout Planet Rails, side project on which I worked for last two weekends. It’s a planet site for top Ruby on Rails related weblogs.

Planet site aggregates feeds of different weblogs into one site. It’s having RSS feed support, so if you subscribe the RSS feed of it, you will never miss posts by your favorite Rails blogs. If you already know existing most popular Rails planet site by Pratik, you know what Planet is.

I have added only few feed channels to it those I like. Mainly to have quality content. Feel free to contact to for adding you popular Rails weblog to the planet. I would definitely try to add it.

On the technical side, I am using my Slicehost slice for hosting it. Mongrel + Nginx combo. It’s using Rails. It is open source you could check its source here. Apart from those thanks to Capistrano + Git which makes development so enjoyable without pain. I see my planet as defacto site to read great Rails posts.

If you find Planet site/source useful please donate 
 
(Blog authors who don’t want to have their posts to be displayed in Planet, feel free to contact, I would happily remove feed).

I am taking part of this exciting game! More info @ http://42times.pbwiki.com and http://tinyurl.com/4uec9b

I took part in a survey on http://typefocus.com. My personality type came out to be “INTJ”.
So overall description for INTJ is here

It is now official that Rails is moving to Git. I am more happy because I love both Git and Rails. From last couple of months Git became my favourite source control tool. I was so much excited about it that I read most articles/posts/manuals about it for last some months, I gave a BarCamp presentation on it. I have been using it lot, for my personal side-projects.

Some days ago, I forked koz-rails(Rails repo git mirror) repository, considering that I would start hacking Rails source. I had no idea that Rails would officially move to Git that time. I had read some posts of Koz that it is not that easy to start using Git to manage Rails source. But now after reading DHHs announcement post, I am happy.

The good thing is that it will use GitHub (awesome Git repository hosting site). I am in love with GitHub since I heard about it. I think, I am one of the earlier users of GitHub and that makes it and me special that Rails is using GitHub.

Even DHH himself has written good words about Git and GitHub. Chris also wrote some posts related to this announcement.

I always find that like minded people like similar things and it continues. I also noticed that whatever I like becomes Hit and popular(oh yeah). I think I have some little sense to predict about any app and its future. I think I can definitely define product features for a successful app. I think I also understand the market and what people want and expect. This is why I am more eager to develop my side projects.

Update 12 April, 08: You could visit Rails repository at http://github.com/rails/rails/tree./

For cloning do

git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git

My fork for Rails is at http://github.com/anildigital/rails/tree

One of my good friends, Pratik Naik is now officially member of Rails core team. I still don’t realize that the guy, to whom I used to meet when I was with Reevik(my first company), is now in Rails core team.

When I started my career with Ruby on Rails, Pratik too had started working Ruby on Rails in those days. Pratik also was working with Betterlabs and I was with Reevik Technologies. There were only two companies in Pune, which were using Ruby and Ruby on Rails for projects. We used to meet at various Ruby meets in Pune.

I would like to thank Pratik for gifting me domain names anilw.info and anil.rails.in with server spaces. One of the reasons I continued career in Ruby on Rails is Pratik. We have been discussing about tech topics IRCs, messengers, twitters for sometime. He always helped/guided me. He is nice guy. I congratulate him for his achievement and greatness. Great work man! He currently works with a London based startup(makers of Bebo and BirthdayAlarm.com). Do check out his nice blog, http://m.onkey.org.

Recently I got interested in using Git. I like it too much. I already have some Git repositories on my Slicehost server. From last month, I am using a Git repository hosting service GitHub.com. I have become a fan of this service. Now I have two homes for my projects’ repositories, one is GitHub and other on my Slicehost server.

It always felt good to commit changes locally, push them to server with one command. Git added that geeky-ness to my coding. I came to know about GitHub when I read this post. Since then, I was waiting for its launch and one good day, I got beta invite for GitHub from Chris.

GitHub brings a social aspect into play. GitHub is kind of social network for developers with codes. I almost felt it when I forked a repository first time.

Git has very nice features. Some of which I like the most are forking, sending pull requests, nice UI of repository browser, news feeds, follow, hCard-ed profiles and simple project wikis etc.
I think Git adoption by developers is very near. Fantastic tool like GitHub is making it happen. I am very happy to be early adopter of this service.

I know, this is the kind of app/service which is really benefiting me than any-other as it is helping for coding and improving it. I think it is one of the best things on internets

Update: Oh yeah, I have a couple github invites if anyone wants them.

This was fourth time, I attended BarCamp Pune. It was very cool. I was already excited about it, seeing preparation by its organizers. This time, I was not among organizers for it, but was in volunteer’s list. I mostly spent my time discussing with other geeks. The only talk I fully attended was our PurpleTrail presentation and demo by Anuj. Obviously it was the best talk of this BarCamp

It was very nice experience to meet Latesh, a tech freak from Mumbai. He was very much interested in knowing what Git is and (almost) listened to me very enthusiastically when I explained and demonstrated about it. I hope I was able to inspire him to start using Git.

He shared various nice things with me. He described me how he installed MacOSX on his PC. He also showed me the sites showing how to install MacOSX on PCs. From my Macbook, he sshed(logged) into his router(which is there at his home, Mumbai) in which he had installed Linux, then from router, he sshed his MacOSX which is installed on his PC(not Apple built machine, but PC architecture mostly suited for Windows machines). He showed files on his MacOSX, also there he was downloading latest Leopard OS, whoa.. totally awesome. Quite geeky, hacky and interesting right?
We exchanged our Peepcode videos, I had one, he gave me 8 (eight! ). Thanks Latesh. Nice to meet with him.

Diwakar (Google Hacking guy, he was with MangoSpring too) was with me most of time. I missed his talk. He told me about Temper Data( a FF extension to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters).

Talking with Rohit, Tarun, Sidu, Aditya, Shirish and other geeks made me happy. I am almost waiting for next BarCamp Pune.

Last but not the least, I gave a talk this time. It was titled “Git Introduction”. It was fine. My first endevour to present at BarCamp as I had mentioned in this post. I have shared it on Slideshare.

Here it is.

| View | Upload your own

No good project is worth than a project with good idea/new concept. I found Yahoo! Live came out with nice concept. From last couple of years, I always got fascinated about new ideas, the very earlier was blogging, then social networking, youtube, social bookmarking, flickr, ..etc. Yahoo! Live is all about being live with no hassle. Just open site and click Go Live, thats it.. you are now live(The web-cam of your laptop/pc is doing all magic behind).

You can see me ON AIR in above pic, I am seeing technosailor performing guitar along with other guys and Premshree. Premshree is one of the lead developers of Yahoo! Live. I came to know about Yahoo! Live because of him. Nice to know that he hadn’t slept last 50 hours as he was fixing things.

The plus things for Yahoo! Live are

1. Nice developer API http://developer.yahoo.com/ylive/
2. Simplicity
3. Features which are really necessary, no extra junk.
4. Anybody can start rocking live at any time, people are there to watch
5. … the X factor

One minus point which I could think of is, Yahoo! Live can be misused to spread obscene material. Overall, Yahoo! Live will definitely rock in future! Nice done Premshree!

This is my first blog post of 2008! I am little reluctant to write it, as I am doing plenty of new things(and seriously don’t have much time). I am writing this post for the sake of writing the post only.

Nearly one year ago (Dec 26, 06), I joined MangoSpring. The year 2007 started with my work there. It has been always full of joy and energy. I worked for TaskBin.com, which was previously intended to be used in our office only. But we launched it as product due to awesome benefits it gives. You could find hundreds of reviews about TaskBin with Google. It is basically a group task management application built with Ruby on Rails. I later continued working on our next big thing product http://purpletrail.com. I will write about it more later. 

I have been exploring Ruby language and Rails framework. I still find myself learning the language and framework and features in them. This is the reason why I like Ruby, Rails.  Whole year, I almost spent most of my time at work and little time at other things. I managed to buy a MacBook. It was my dream thing. I knew it will change my life and vision and it did. Whole year, I took many(certain) decisions, now finding I was correct. I followed my heart. 

Now I am finding(after analyzing a bit) that I could have done a lot more that what I did last year. Whether it is personally, for work, for community, for people. Talking about technology, I have decided I won’t let a chance of not learning or not trying. I will try to grasp as more as I can. I will try to develop as more as I can.

Two days ago, I bought a slice(VPS) at Slicehost.com, coz from last two years, for my small weekend projects/tries, I used the web servers(shared hosts), domains gifted to me by friends. It was all limited experience with those. You just dont have full control over the server. You just can not do whatever you want/ed to do. You are restricted. You are forced not to try. I just hated that. I went and bought a slice. (costs me around $20 pm). I could now develop small ideas locally on MacBook, whole experience of setting up servers(Apache, Nginx, Mongrel), installation of new softwares at servers, try them out there, optimization of application with server was missing with shared hosting. I wanted to do that all on my own. I will use this VPS as my personal laptop thing. I will play with it as it is a game .  I have a strong desire to write my blog with my developed blog app with Ruby code from scratch. I will definitely try to do that once it is setup properly, whoa.

Year 2007 was my last year to use SVN personally. Yes! I wont use it anymore. I am a Git fan and learning it. I will use Git for my apps. I dont know why but I am becoming editor agnostic(was die hard VIM fan). I think I should use only one editor, but still in love of Textmate and Eclipse. All of them helps me under certain situations.

I recently tried and played with jQuery, it is all awesome and you don’t feel that you are coding with javascript any more. It’s like activerecord methods you use. I plan to use most of  jQuery in future. I almost forgot and won’t use prototype and scriptaculous. 

I think the year 2008 will be of my creations, my endeavours. I would try to attend almost every technical camps happen at Pune and near cities. 

The standard site that I found last year was Twitter. I am sure many people dont know what benefits it gives. Actually many people around don’t have that much mind standard to understand its importance. They just feel it’s just like any another site. But it helped me a lot; like del.icio.us helped me in 2005. It is all about new concept.

I get fascinated by Ruby metaprogramming and features it has. I almost like every single Rails feature. I think Rails is built with certain mindset in mind which is a standard in itself.  

… . . I can write so much about the techie, geeky things that I have been trying and it will be a long post so.. stopping here! 

I am looking forward to nice heart-touching music by A. R. Rahman for upcoming movies.