Niket Patel

Finally, Registered for RailsConf 2008. and Gathering requirements to attend RailsConf.

Just today, I heard about live-documents, a product from Bangalore based startup. The guy behind company is Hotmail fame Sabeer Bhatia. I’m still waiting for invitation but I observed few things good and bad.

The good:

1) Their “About Us” page: I really like what they said

InstaColl is a Bangalore-based start-up founded with a singular vision – establish the first “Made by India” product brand that is globally recognized and appreciated.

Please note that is “Made by India” and not just “Made in India” – half the software products in the world are probably already developed to some extent in India but can you name even one product brand made by India…no? We thought so – this is therefore our raison dêtre…

Also attached screenshot if those get changed.

2) Offline Plugin: This really cool idea. and indeed must have for product to sell itself in countries like India where still people don’t live 24×7 online

The bad:

1) Look: Oh, come on… don’t copy UI of products of company who it self expert in copier business. ( but more I think, it make sense actually for them. specially considering offline plugin )

2) I suspect that Mr. Bhatia will deal again sometime in future if product get successful . And buyer will make lovely product a bad one again.

Screenscarping

• why screen-scrapping ? – Don’t until essential
• build app on scrapped models
  • Reform plugin
  • reform generator
  • reform record
• still lots of manual work

Making Rails More (Artificially) Intelligent

• New subject for me
• Bayesian Networks
• Naive Bayes Classifier
• Genetic Algorithms (Optimize web page revenue from advertisements)
• sbn, Simple Bayesian Networks
• bn4r, Bayesian Networks for Ruby
• Probability Distribution Tables
• Ruby Classifier – Bayesian and LSI classification library

Really Scaling Rails

• lessons from twitter
• not so exciting, all things already discussed over and over.
• expecting some open source tools within weeks

Rubinius, Improving The Rails Ecosystem

• I’m glad that I attended this session, pretty interesting stuff and nice person
• All talk centered arround Rubinius going well.
• MRI vs Rubinius
• worth try
• some comments and questions are interesting from Ola Bini

The Rest of REST

• Starts with interesting history
• REST, web architectural style
• Hypertext as the engine of application state
• Rest of REST
• Use your brains!
  • don’t design-by-buzzword
  • don’t believe everything you read
  • always keep in mind that change is inevitable

“Best Practices” Michael Koziarski Marcel Molina Jr.

• Most interesting talk so far. good chemistry between presenters
• Not new stuff for people follows RailsWay
• Skinny Controllers
• Named Callbacks

JRuby on Rails at ThoughtWorks” Ola Bini

• Ola Bini, very interesting and intelligent guy. I’m impressed
• JRuby progressing well
• UnitRecord
• Waffle Web Framework
• I used JRuby in project because I wanted to connect MSSQL and ruby/unix odbc/mssql over thin internet pipe is horrible. JRuby worked quite well
• Glasshfish Gem for Rails competitor to mongrel, some predicts death of mongrel
• install4j

Outsourcing to Open Source

• Tobias Luetke given very interesting talk.
• community engine is very important to small teams like Shopify
• though I never used Liquid

Browser-based Testing of Massive Ajax-using Rails Applications with Selenium

• I’m still learning use of Selenium
• But its very useful tool and directly tests what matter most.

Extending Rails to Use the Presenter Pattern

• most boring talk I have attended at railsconf so far.
• still topic is interesting and worth to try

NetBeans and Ruby

• Arun Gupta was demoing NetBeans and jMaki
• At one point he confused how to migrate down using NetBeans and he doesn’t seems to know CLI way, thats example of over reliance on IDE tools. when IDE fails you fails
• but it was pretty interesting tech and worth looking at

Obscure Data Formats, Workflow, and Remote Synchronization

• Very interesting talk
• more soon ….

I'm attending RailsConf Europe 2007 and following are the sessions I'm looking forward to attend. Most of the sessions are interesting, two exciting days ahead :)

Recently, I was working on one ruby on rails project. where base site has many sub sites based on regions. we required to restrict many queries based on current-region/specific-region. the best solution I figured is add functionality to find method instead of using SQL JOINS.

  def self.find(*args)
    if args.first == :first || args.first == :all
      if args.last.is_a?(Hash) && (region = args.last[:for_region]) && region.is_a?(Region)
        with_scope(:find => {:include => [:regionals], 
                                        :conditions =>  "regionals.region_id = #{region.id}"}) do
          args.last.delete(:for_region)
          super(*args)
        end
      else
        super
      end
    else
      super
    end
  end

I wrote above code in Business model. now I'm able to

Business.find(:first, :for_region => current_region)
Business.find(:all, :for_region => current_region)
Business.find(:all, :for_region => Region.find(params[:region_id]), Any other valid find option ...)

isn't it cool?

Writing is skill, many great people born with it. but unfortunately I’m not. so I decided to enhance and sharpen that skill and now on. I’m going to write my experiences in web development. where I faced challenges, how I solved that… blah blah

Now, I decided to keep my working with rails profile as current as possible. and also will try to keep my availability status current.

If you worked with me in past. and wanted me to recommend. you can do so by visiting my working with rails profile.

here is promotional video of nip/tuck fancast system. which we developed last month.

munnar – trip
Originally uploaded by Niket Patel.

Today, I uploaded my munnar trip photos. hetal & me enjoyed that trip very very much.

What I liked in munnar?
Clean Air. which at low availability in gandhinagar where I lives.

S4200392-2
Originally uploaded by Niket Patel.

A nice sun rise. I would like to live a place where I can see nice sunrise like this.
Oh, Currently I work till morning 5.00AM and wakes up in Mid of Day. I don’t remember when last , I seen a sunrise.

Today, SvN has a nice article reading now at 4:30 at night or morning. I’m not a basically designer but sometimes like to read good articles & blogs on design.

which leads me to Find the Epicenter

nice to read both the articles.

I liked the text in “About Quicksilver” Dialog box.

Yesterday , For one of my rails application, I need to add nice javascript popup window that fade background to after little googling , I came to know Prototype Window Class

Prototype Window Class can help to create any type of floating/popup windows or dialog windows.

http://prototype-window.xilinus.com/

After satisfied with textmate while evaluating. finally today I had purchased it.

And posting this blog entry with textmate. really gr8 time saver.