oceanician

I feel Chris was a very intelligent human, who conveyed complex information, in a human-digestable manner, that many others of us struggle with.

I saw him present in Manchester at our ruby meetup, and later online.

We interacted a little about jobs at Shopify. But there didn't seem to be a part-time option for me. Something I need due to some health issues of my own.

I wonder if we as a group of ruby loving people, and the wider tech industry, can learn from this? I don't know.

It seems no matter what was said, the outcome would have been the same? I guess we'll never know. It's likely that those who worked with him, and were trusted, will perhaps say more intime. I hope they do not feel bad in any way. But perhaps there's aspects his family and close colleagues will be able to share intime, when things are less hurtful so we can learn a little from how to help others in this situation?

Big hugs to those close to Chris. And big respect to those writing amazing blogs in his memory.

Hugs to all.

Glad it was saved. Other early contenders for the 'first' title include the ones from Manchester: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1

Wow. So 1950s. I wonder if this was the very first data visualisation then?

http://www.reddit.com/r/tinyhouses

I've debating about doing this in the UK with a 32ft shipping container, and possibly straw bail externally for insulation, and a water collector on the roof for grey usage.

Seen some great projects in London & Brighton, but non in Manchester for homes yet. Though there's been a great use for offices in the Sharp project.

Anyone else in the UK looking at this sort of thing?

One question: Why the wheels if you're only going to move it every so often - say a couple of years?

I wonder how many are merely 'consulting' or not even that, just on a 3 month tourist?

Hey, this is sound advice.

I've a very early days version of a travel bucket list app, that I've geographically limited to one city - my own, as the place that you can fly out from. I know that I want user's who are more travel-orientated than typical as early adopters.

I've been building up a social profile on facebook, with high quality articles/links, and interacting with travel focused people on twitter. I've added links back to the application from the facebook article. And, it feels like I'm doing this right. But, it's not yet gaining much traction, whilst actually soaking up a lot of time, and I feel like I'm not in a coding-mindset if I do too much of this that day.

I've got a small bunch of users, who are seeded from friends and friends of friends. Even a couple of randoms. Today I'm sending out a site update email, and showing them what they can do to help, as well as showing them the plan for 2014, and some interesting travel information.

I hope it makes a difference, as I agree that you need a 100 or so users initially. I've been talking to an airport about physical advertising, and I think it's too early for that at the moment, but I'm working on getting it at a reduced rate.

Ultimately, it maybe that I've tried to engage with people too early in the development process, and I need to get on with development. Tricky, though as once you start engaging it feels that you really should keep those channels going.

Anyway. Basically, I'm agreeing. And this is a progress update as to what I've been doing so far. I think there's many other things I could do; actually getting permission to survey those in the arrival area of my local airport being one. There's plenty more, but my time is limited, and in a city where the startup scene is fairly new, it's pretty hard to find co-founders, though that would be a MASSIVE help.

Cheers for the post & I hope my thoughts/progress are useful to others. Thanks for reading.

Cheers, this is interesting as I've recently started a travel planning project, incorporating prices of flights, lately. Would love to chat to others who've gained traction, and started making sales in this area.

Also make sure you someone from the business who'se interested in the project. Make them interested if needs be i.e. find out what pain points they experienced with the old app, and have a think about what you can do together to improve that area of functionality.

Together write a regular report to the rest of the business about what's happening, and give a fortnightly update.

I'd write down several simple features that the web application will need to do.

Then put them into Trello.

Then prioritise which ones are the most valuable to the business.

Then try and code those first.

Perhaps at this point, try and break that 1st task down into 3 or 4 subtasks.

Write a checklist of every little detail that the pages should have.

As you do even the smallest of things, tick of that element in the checklist.

Ask questions to those that your working for.

Make suggestions for improvement if you notice them, but understand that their maybe genuine business / user reasons for some oddities you'll find.

Perhaps there's public snapshots that you can start with?

I'm glad that both of these companies exist and offer globally competitive hosting, and are both local to myself.

Can either offer a service where you can create a new server setup with a RoR / Db setup from an image though?

I mostly use Heroku until I have users these days, but I do think there's maybe a trick in offering mirroring of the heroku functionality from the cmd line :)

Keep up the great work.

would love to see this done in space: http://www.biosphericproject.com/frontpage (A biospheric greenhouse project in Salford/Manchester, UK.

Really good idea, but needs more consumer & business ideas on. Too many geek tools at the moment.

time is indeed flying. even 2001 seems like yesterday for me.

This looks really good. Just need another Ruby programmer to try it out with now :) Anyone free a week today - next Friday, 26th July?

It would be interesting to see good examples of how others have recruited, and not ended up with near-100% male developer employees.

Going to be harder for people to clone that than Reader :/

This works great for me if not used too frequently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0EgzJ0KGxg

Wish there was a 8 hour version!

Cheers for the reminder. I've definitely seen this before, but had completely forgot to set it up on my new laptop. Good post.

Lots of pdfs with no alternatives here: http://www.manchester.gov.uk/site/scripts/meetings_index.php

I feel like it's a step improvement, and will help people use the site.

However, what I'd have really liked to see is machine readable minutes of the council.

This is something that's a bit of a bug bear having ended up setting up a project awhile back to try and bring-out the minutes etc of the council meetings. We called it MCC Work For You: https://code.google.com/p/mcc-work-for-you/ Sadly within the confines of a hackday we couldn't get as much progress as we'd have liked. However, as a proof of concept it was useful, and did inspire @CountCulture to go forward with his site: http://openlylocal.com/

I'd really like to see progress in this area, and the encouragement of councils to make progress with making the minutes readable. Definitely helpful for investigative journalists, as well exposing the good work of councillors.

I wonder if there's a plan somewhere for this? I couldn't find it on the site.....

I think estimation is task dependant.

For instance if you've a well documented API of a competitive company that you know you can access in a familiar RESTful manner vs an established player with a SOAP interface, that has documentation - but it's wrong, and no available libraries for the language you are completing the task in, and a support team that wrong identifies the xml you're sending them as correct, it's going to take an unpredictable time. Even doing a vaguely related task using SOAP a few months previous hasn't enabled me to predict the duration of the unpredictable nature of SOAP, only that it will take longer.

The biggest difference in duration occurs when teaming up and working in a pair with an experienced developer that I've worked with in the past. Even then it's not a predictable duration on how much quicker this will be, or indeed if there's a guarantee of solving a tricky problem. All you can say it's likely that we'll solve it quicker.

Smaller tasks: Build a CRUD around editing one entity, authentication/authorisation for that and admin area. Estimatable.

More complex tasks that can't be broken down further: Unsure.

Is there no equivalent of the NW Fund in Scotland? http://www.thenorthwestfund.co.uk/

Inspiring article. Also looking back to the root of the site, I'm in awe of how much one person can blog in a quality manner! Pretty jealous!

This looks like a great initial weekend effort from a launch48 (London) environment: http://matchfounders.com/search?accounting=1&business=1&...

I suppose physical meetups alongside would provide some source of sustainable income. How much do they charge? Bizagogo do this quite successfully in London. Could be worth collaborating with them.

There's great value in the startup weekends, but they're mostly for brand new ideas.

Agree about organic matching, but think most people are in full time jobs or freelancers needing payment, so it's very difficult to pitch to everyone - especially if you want non-tech people onboard i.e. one of my ideas requires someone with events management/promotion experience, another would benefit from someone in estate agency.

I think it's always going to be a hard process, and may involve quite a bit of collaboration as well as the initial cofounders. And perhaps even a change of cofoudners as people's situations change later down the line.

Hey - KingOfSpain, get in touch http://ianmoss.com/contact

It'd be great to know which of the basic features beyond 'available and nearby' you'd like to see...

I see that's core (once it's done) as listing consultancies and startups, and clusters accross the country, and referring to external sites for specialised areas.

There'd be value in making a decent search & fuzzy matching of cofounder types, and helping people in embryonic stages of a project progress along the 'next step'.