A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

You think it is not possible to develop a serious web application in 48 hours? Mainly true but I tried my best and you can see the result of 2 days web application development on *.inperspektive.com The idea was a test run for the Startup Weekend in Hamburg, Germany that takes place next week.

The whole idea was spontaneous and I created it within 2 days. This is also a perfect example of how productive Ruby on Rails is.

What is *.inperspektive.com?

A web application that enables you to find, share and discuss items that bring things into perspective like panel discussions, interviews, personal blog comments, subjective videos and more. Everything less objective and open for discussion.

Warning, this site was a test project and is not ready for production use, so submitted data can get lost. Feel free to try it and give some feedback. I know a lot of features are missing but hey? I had 48 hours to create a web app really from scratch. Check out some nice Rails commercials. Be warned, the site can be very slow because nothing is optimized and it is just shared hosting. I try to keep the site online as long as possible.

And the best, you can read some insights about the whole development as a chronology.

The development chronology as PDF or as shared Google doc.

Development Screenshots

I would like to hear some feedback and your impressions?

Because of a lack of time, I cannot work anymore on this project and I am ready to sell the whole application including 30 hours of developed code, 3 domains and all underlying ideas and thoughts. I would get weak if someone offers me a MacBook Pro 15 inch with 4Gb RAM.

Looking forward to next weekends startup camp in Hamburg.

Cornelius.

I just read an interesting article at the AdaptivePath homepage. The comment is about technical libraries, for example the Association of Computing Machines (ACM) Digital Library, and why they charge for research work that is often publicly sponsored and provided to them for free. If you think of research as sharing and exploring ideas as publicly as possible, their methods seem very contradictory. Supporting Open Access should be a main goal of every researcher. Why not getting a little bit more feedback than locking the work into proprietary databases?

Just some days ago a friend ask me if I could order with my credit card (having one is not common under German students) a paper about risk-based testing. This was about $30 and it was from 2000. Why should a student pay 30 bucks for maybe two sentences that could be useful for his research paper? No, our university library had no access to this database. Luckily, I found after some searching a similar paper from the author with 90% overlap and for free.

These methods move me away from serious research at universities.

My 2cents,

Cornelius.

Wow, how can it be that my last post is close to two months ago. A lot happened in this time and I am finally back in Germany but I will write another post about my great Canadian experience.

I am doing currently a lot of work with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Some will ask what this is and where the advantages are. Ruby is a dynamic, flexible, general-purpose and highly productive programming language that makes programming fun. Programming, fun? With Ruby definitely yes, with C, C++, Java, Scheme, PHP yeah maybe, I don’t know. Ruby on Rails is a powerful web application framework that gives you the ability to create quickly database-driven state-of-the-art web applications. It uses a lot of best practices and clever abstractions to simplify the whole development process. It makes your development professional from day one without being a software engineer for several years. There are so many advantages for most of my projects I like to do, so I definitely want to deepen my knowledge around Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

At the end two interesting videos.

David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish software developer and the creator of Ruby on Rails, develops a blog in 15! minutes. An amazing quick introduction to Rails. This does not mean that Rails can only be used for simple web projects as a blogging system. It is very powerful and if you are interested in developing a web application you should definitely take a look at it.

A very well-done clone of the Apple vs. Microsoft advertising. To summarize: Java is often overwhelmingly complex and the wrong choice for most of the projects.