Tech Notes From The Trenches

The other day I released the Whuffiebank gem. It is a library that implements the Whuffiebank API in Ruby.

Even though I have tested it and written tests to go with it, I haven’t used it yet. I plan to implement it on Hopsy, but I haven’t had time yet.

I am not a hardcore user of the Whuffiebank, meaning that I haven’t given any whuffies yet and no one has ever given me any whuffies. I have yet to contribute to the Whuffie economy.

But I like the idea of Twitter handles having a certain monthly ‘karma number‘. That’s why I built this open source gem. Hopefully it will be useful for many developers.

At Hopsy, I have used it to rank tweets. I have built a simple formula that takes the Topsy influence and the Whuffiebank reputation and returns a number.

The higher the number, the more important the result. Simple. That’s my attempt to reduce the ‘Twitter noise‘ out there. I know there is still a long way to go.

It has been quite an exciting year in New York for me and Aycron. There were highs and lows. The lows were mostly around the beginning of 2009. The highs, around the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010.

The economical crisis in 2009 did affect us, but not as much as you would have expected. The lows were mostly because I had just moved to New York and it took me a few months to get started on Aycron’s business development.

The fact is that Aycron had one client in New York when I first arrived. Now we have four clients in New York. In February, we might have six clients. I am happy about that. It took a lot of hard work from everyone at Aycron, but the future is bright for 2010.

The number of clients is not that important. What’s important is that our clients are happy with our work. They are happy to recommend us to prospective clients and honestly talk about their experience with Aycron.

It is hard work to keep our clients happy, but we go the extra mile. And it feels good to hear what they have to say about our efforts. I think we need to get even better at keeping our clients happy and that’s why we are hiring! (in Buenos Aires)

In 2009 we became partners of Engine Yard, worldwide leader in Ruby on Rails applications hosting and big supporter of the RoR community.

In 2010 we became partners of Fluid Intent, which will help Aycron’s business development in New York in the future.

We plan to continue rocking it for our clients. We want to keep them happy, as they are our best source of projects. We plan to build and release a few products/services this year, something that we started on 2009.

We plan to increase our development team as much as possible. But this will be a gradual process that will let us assure the quality of our work. All of this is possible thanks to our new clients in New York and the great engineers at Aycron.

The other day I was browsing through open source projects on GitHub and I found the topsy gem. (A gem is a ruby library that can be used for a certain purpose)

Initially, I was upset. It was a new gem for something that I had built more than one month ago. I thought that the programmer behind it (Wynn Netherland) should have collaborated with my existing gem: rtopsy.

After reviewing his code, I realized that he had developed a better version of my gem. So I decided that it was an opportunity to learn more about Ruby, gems and APIs.

I reached out to Wynn (via Twitter) and we decided to collaborate on the topsy gem. I added some ‘business objects’ to the gem. He added some logic for the rate limit status info. I added more documentation and examples. We worked through tests together.

The end result: A more stable version of the Topsy API Ruby gem. In the process, I learned a lot about testing code with fakeweb.