September 2012

Pants On? Then Post it!

Published on September 13, 2012September 13, 2012 by Yakov FainLeave a comment

This is one of the topics that I keep coming back to over and over again. It’s about how young kids ruin their careers by posting something stupid online. These days employers routinely make quick Google searches by the job applicant’s name and in many cases quietly throw their resumes in the shredder. They won’t write them back explaining why they did it, and they don’t have to after seeing your drunk smily face with your pants down.

Since the young generation has difficulties reading anything longer than 140 characters, the number of ways to pass the message across is limited. Using infographic might work with your teenager of the undergrad student. I’d like to bring your attention to the nice infographic titled “Should I post this?” If you don’t like reading, just go straight to the picture.

Enlarge this diagram and post it on your teen’s wall.

Think out of the box

Published on September 10, 2012September 10, 2012 by Yakov Fain3 Comments

Just came back from a dinner with my business partners hosted by Anatole. When the dinner was almost over he said, “Man, I forgot to put the red caviar on the table”. Red caviar is also known as salmon roe.

I said, “OK, let’s get some, but we need bread and butter”. After that I went on talking about that good tasting Amish butter I’ve enjoyed last month in Pennsylvania. Anatole replied, “It’s easy, I’ll make you a good butter in two minutes.” Then he poured some heavy cream in a cup and turned on the blender.

Two minutes later we’ve enjoyed the butter better than the one I bought at the Amish market.

I always knew that Anatole thinks out of the box, but not to this extent!

What Makes a Web Application Enterprisey?

Published on September 5, 2012September 6, 2012 by Yakov Fain6 Comments

We’re starting writing a book for O’Reilly that’s titled “Enterprise Web Applications: From DeskTop to Mobile”. The book will be available under Creative Commons license, which means you can read it and provide your feedback from the get go. Here’s the github repository where we’ll keep the current version of the book. In the morning we had a discussion about the meaning of the word Enterprise applied to Web applications. Below is the draft we came up with and we ask your input – would you agree or have a different understanding of the meaning of the term “Enterprise Web Application”.

The easiest way to do this is by example. Creating a Web application that will place process orders is not the same as creating a Web site to publish blogs. Enterprise applications include company specific workflows, might need to be integrated with number of internal systems, data sources and processes.

Google Doc would not be enterprise Web application. But Google appliance integrating search operating on company documents, databases, processes, tickets, and providing collaboration is – it integrates consumer/workforce front office with what the company does (back office).

Google Maps is not an enterprise application. But a Google map integrated within the company site used by insurance agents to plan daily route, scheduling, doing address verification and geocoding – can be considered and enterprise application.

Just using a Web application for business doesn’t make it an enterprise Web application. If you take Gmail as is, it won’t be an enterprise application until you integrate it into another process of your business.

Is an online game an enterprise application? It depends on the game. A multi-player online roulette game hooked up to a payment system, and maintaining users’ accounts is an enterprise Web application. But playing Sudoku online doesn’t look too enterprisey.

How about a dating Web site? If the site just offers an ability to display singles it’s more of a publishing site as there is not much of a business there. Can you turn a dating Web site into an enterprise application? It’s possible.

Some people will argue that an enterprise application must supports multiple user, high load, be scalable, have business and persistence layers, offer professional support et al. We don’t believe that a Web application should do all this to become qualify for the adjective enterprise.

Let’s keep the definition simple.

An enterprise Web application is the one that helps an organization running its business online

In this book we are going to build a Save the Child Web application that will allow people to register, donate, find local kids that need help, match donors and recipients, upload images, videos and display statistics. Would these feature make Save the Child an enterprise Web application? Yes, our definition does not require an organization to be profitable. Our non-for-profit organization that collects donations for ill kids is our enterprise.

From Quill Pens to O’Reilly Publishing

Published on September 3, 2012September 6, 2012 by Yakov Fain5 Comments

1812

Imagine I wanted to write a book about Web development in the year 1812. Which tools would I need? I’d need an ink, a quill pen, and a stack of paper. To make multiple copies of the book, a publisher would hire a bunch of people who’d use ink, quill pens, and a stack of paper. By the way, this nice image of a quill pen is taken from Wikipedia.

2009

Quill pens are gone. My colleagues and I were writing another book for O’Reilly. The process was not as simple as in 1812: we used MS Word with the publisher’s template. When the draft of a chapter was ready I’d upload it to the publisher server and send an email to the editor. It’s not too bad is it?

2012

First, we’re happy to say that O’Reilly Publishing has accepted our new book proposal “Enterprise Web Development: From Desktop to Mobile“. The book will have four authors and let me tell you how we are going to write it.

The chapters should be submitted into O’Reilly’s SVN code repository in XML-based markup called DocBook so the publisher can eventually convert the text into multiple formats for the multi-channel distribution.

Just had a meeting with my co-authors to decide on the work flow for the book writing. First, my hat off to O’Reilly for allowing use to make the manuscript available for everyone (as we add content) online for free. This is really cool – we’ll be building community around the book while writing it and, I’m sure, we’ll be getting lots of good feedback, which will definitely improve the quality of the final version of the book.

But let me explain you the work flow and the environment we’re planning to create and use for the book writing.

0. Create an account with a mind-mapping service (we use MindMeister ) so the co-authors can easily store and exchange the ideas related to this project.

1. Create a repository in Github where we’ll store all the book content – the text and the code samples.

2. Create a Web site on Github where people can read the book (under Creative Commons license) as HTML document.

3. The text editor of choice is Sublime Text 2, where we’ll write the text not in DocBook, but in a more simple to read format – John Gruber’s Markdown.

4. Write a shell script that will do the following:
a) Convert Markdown into DocBook using Pandoc
b) Submit Markdown to Github with an option for automatic conversion into
HTML and publishing it online.

5. Install and configure Jenkins Continuous Integration Server to run the items in Step 4 automatically

6. Make sure that Jenkins automatically submits the generated DocBook to O’Reilly’s Subversion server.

7. Create a small proof of concept to test all of the above and get the confirmation from O’Reilly that all this automatic generation-conversion-submission works and the resulting data format is acceptable.

Do you like this quill pen, circa 2012? We do and are looking forward to working with O’Reilly!