New Rails projects!

Many important things happened here in OBS Labs since my last post. We visited European Rails conference in Berlin, Germany. We completed Social Network site for web startup in Switzerland (hope its going to be another exciting site about wine). We participated in softlaunch of Quevita (http://www.quevita.com/) potentially largest European social network around healthy living style.

Now i am in conversation with Supercool School (supercoolschool.com). This can be non-profit project where i and some of our developers could use our Rails coding skills to bring Change in Africa and countries with weak education system. This is going to be top cool project and i cant wait to join this Supercool team.

Launch application in 6 weeks - myth or reality?

Some great Rails development companies guarantee that they can launch the first version of your desired app in just as fast as 6 weeks!

WoW! That sounds great- we can get desirable result in about 1.5 month - this is the way one can think of it...

Is it real?
Yes it is. There is no magic here and you don't have to be David Blane to do it. Here is where the trick is. Most companies (including OBS Labs) use Rails in pair with Agile development(SCRUM, eXtreme Programming or whatever). In this approach development divide into series of 2 week iterations. As a result of each iteration clients receive fully-workable and tested code, that includes few (5-10) features for that iteration. After reviewing iteration result features for the next iter. are discussed together with client.
So typically in 6 weeks you can have 3 iteration and from 15-30 featured fully workable application. Isn't it enough for average 1.0 version, prototype or whatever? Well, it definitely should be enough to make client to sign long term contract ;-)
How can OBS Labs beat it?
Well, at first we are not trying to compete with anyone. We are small, experienced at what we are doing for years, do it good and our clients love us for that dedicated approach.
We use same latest Rails technologies, contribute to new open source trendy stuff as well, use same practices for project management, trying to keep quality as our idol.
And when you can buy two similar products you should consider price as a important factor.

Personally i love American cars. I am currently driving 2005 Chevy Tahoe and i am so happy with it. In Europe its quite expensive to have American full size, but i still love it. Those who know a little about this car know that its build on same platform as other GM models like Chevy Silverado, Chevy Suburban, Caddy Escalade and Hummer H2. I dont need to carry bike or logs so i don't need Silverado, i am not Texas farmer with 5 kids so i dont need Suburban, i dont like rap so no need for Caddy, and offroad is not for me so H2 wasn't my choice. For me my Tahoe is just the smart choice between this models. I simply dont want to pay extra $$$ for chrome on wheels and handles while I enjoy full size car, i never had problems with taking additional passenger or bag with me and i am not scared with hard road conditions. The right choice for me.

OBS value for similar project would be as much as about 3 times less than other companies can offer. They will charge you about $120-$150/hour saying that they are the only and the best experts on that market. We normally charge about $50/hour, while paying our developers about the same rate as they do! (Today rates of developers in Russia rising to EU and US ranges, and its not a good way to save just on salaries) How can we handle it? The answer is simple both they and we are using offshore developers , but our developers are all in on office in Russia, we cant afford to invest as much in marketing and advertising, being Formula1 team sponsor pay top $$$ to managers and shareholders(OBS Labs is hold by developers themselves). When you work with OBS Labs the structure of your costs is simple, clear and top efficient!

Sounds good, can you show me some examples?
You are always welcome. We just recently completed and launched social networking application in one man/month, we created ecommerce and mailing application in 2 weeks! Some time ago we did simple CMS system in about 4 weeks? Want some more? I can refer to both clients who work with us for years and clients competed their first goals for less than 6 weeks. Please contact me directly by vlad _at) obsgroup.biz for more information and consultancy on your project.

Some Rails code tips

Recently we did internal code review for one of our clients.
After results been send we were asked whats wrong with code we pointed out:

v = params[:vintage].to_i if v < 100
if v < (Date.today.year - 2000)
v = 2000 + v
else
v = 1900 + v
end
end

One developer failed to explain, because he wasn't the guy who did this review and he didn't know the context.
The context was the it was inside one of the actions instead being separate method in controller or even in helper.
The tendency in Rails (accordind to its creators, and common sense) says that action code should be as simple as possible - in perfect world just calls to some methods and rendering page
In this case it should be something like

v = get_vine_vintage(params[:vintage])

or something, with method defined somewhere else. We always should keep controller actions code clean and readable.

After European RailsConf

Thanks to everyone who met us at RailsConf in Berlin! It was nice to meet all of you and to hear the last tendencies in Rails development from principals.

This year event wasn't as popular as year before but i believe its all for good. After being known as a silver bullet for killing web projects that everyone wanted to hire, Rails is becoming de-facto one of the smartest options for small-medium size web projects.

Some update on our projects: we are running 3 projects for our Swiss clients at the moment, still working with one of the oldest and most valuable clients in US, looking forward to pick another US client which is a well-known web 2.0 site.

Rails Conference Europe '08

Don't forget to register on European Rails Conf that will be held 02-04.09 in Berlin, Germany!
OBS had a lot of fun there last year, same as on main event in Portland, OR.
Registration site:
europe.railsconf.org


See you at Railsconf!

OBS Labs Launches the First RoR Social Network Adult Site

Recently we released version one of Dominatrix (www.dominr.com)– the first Adult social network website based on RoR.
It was done in just a few weeks by Dmitry Vyazov, OBS Labs Senior RoR Developer.
Site offers popular features enabling people collaborate – private messages, photo galleries, blogs. In just a few days over 30 users already registered there. We hope that target audience will find this resource very useful
“Using Ruby on Rails helped us to run site fast and keep good possibilities for extending and scaling application”, Dmitry says.

Kyte: Check this out!

Mail Servers Update

We are in process of migration to the newer mail server.
Some of your emails to @obsgroup.biz may not be delivered

Please use "read report" option for all your emails to us with next two days.
Thank you!

New European Projects!

After my trip to Berlin, Germany I am happy to announce that we are continue and extend our relations with European SW companies

• We will continue work on billing and potentially other modules for Berlin-based startup with is on Medea-exchange market. Their new product hopefully will play a revolutionary role in B2B media exchange and sales and OBS is happy to be a part of it!
• We just signed long term contract with a new Zürich, Swiss-based startup company. They are in development of unique health-style community site. We hope that our team would help them a lot in this project. At initial state a team of just Alex and Slava will work with them, but potentially we are going to extend these relations.

We are very happy to grow up our business in Europe and always looking for a new partners there as well as in States and all over the World.

Amazon Web Services Services

We are proud to start up a new project using Amazon Web Services(tm) technology.

Basically it's an innovation technology that allows you to scale your applications on data and computing as easy as never before.

Simple Storage Service (S3) - is a technology used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time on web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own services.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Just as S3 enables "storage in the cloud", Amazon EC2 enables "compute in the cloud". Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment.

OBS Labs is just a one of a very few groups all over the world who have so deep experience with AWS platform. If you are interested in our services as well please feel free to contact us!

Registration for RailsConf 2008 is now open!

I already got mine, don't forget to register fast- it will be sold out quickly!
Register here: https://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/register

See you in Portland!

New projects updates

We got a bug rush on all projects after NY holidays here.

Here is just a few of projects we work now:

• We finished Iteration 2 (Project management) of ERP system for US SEO and web development company. Now expecting some feedback on it and cant wait to continue with other modules.

• Yesterday we also started development of new social network that will be focused on adult content. Its for our new UK client. We are doing it in a very rapid agile way so expecting to have good results within couple weeks.

• I am also in a discussion of our partnership with Germany company that provides B2B services in media content exchange. They are seeking for provider to develop their billing and accounting subsystem. This going to be challenging and interesting task for couple of our developers. Hope after that we can continue our relations and i could visit Berlin again :)

• Aslo we are on deadline week for our Team Management web site where we faced unexpected troubles with payment systems and need to replace it to paypal very urgently.

Bill Gates leaves Microsoft

Anyway this guy made a lot for the industry.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

OBS Labs wishes Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to our clients, partners and friends!

Let New Year be successful for your life and business. And we are always near to bring your SW ideas to life!

PS: We have day offs within Dec 31st -Jan 3rd, but i am always on phone as usual.

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Its all-in-one solution for online marketing and sales. It would be specially interesting to German customers, as it was recently translated to German!