Category: Rails

Things I Learned at Startup Weekend Calgary

Posted by mendicant – May 4, 2011

Last weekend I went to Startup Weekend Calgary. The event was hosted by @deveshd and @justinnowak at CoworkYYC. Our Startup Weekend coordinator was @thubten. I would like to give a massive shout out to all of these people as they did an incredible job making the weekend great.

As I had never been to a startup weekend before, I really had no idea what to expect. Despite never having been to a startup weekend I had two goals:

  • I wanted to meet some new people in my field or a related field
  • I wanted to try something a little bit new and different and fun

I’m sure there’s a ton of people who have written posts about what happens at startup weekend. Aaron and Chad sum it up much better than I will likely be able to anyway.

My Journey

The night started off with the pitches. There were a ton of good pitches and some very exciting ones. I had some ideas but there was exactly one reason why I didn’t pitch: All my ideas had some sort of resemblance to applications I have built at work – And I came here explicitly not to work on the sort of things I do at work. I came to work on something fun.

My night started off by getting on a team with @clangager. Despite my goal of working on something fun, the original idea we were working on centered around bridging two applications via a middle tier. Luckily for us, the problem had already been solved and in such a way that it wasn’t worth attempting over.

Finally, after a night of deliberating, Chad and I ended up deciding on building @sextrics (Sex+Metrics), initially created to be iPoo of sex. Yes, a ridiculous idea. And if you check our twitter stream, many, many laughs were had over the weekend.

Here is the interesting part. Despite being a totally crazy and outlandish idea (I mean – “Hey! We’ll track how often you have sex, what position, what room and we’ll give you some badges and everyone will laugh”) everyone was intrigued. Literally every single person who came through the space came by to see just what the hell we were doing. And laugh. And talk. We had a ton of fun building it and a ton of fun with each other.

Halfway through the day Saturday, we were also joined by @ianj_alberta, who had never used Ruby, Rails, GitHub or Heroku before. We had a lot of fun discussing Ruby, what it was and how it works. However, where his expertise really shone was due to the fact that not only was he a developer, he is also a photographer with Photoshop experience. He built all of the location icons and helped cut out all of the position icons.

In the end, we made our pitch and came in second to @MidoDeals. Congrats to that team.

My Lessons

It was a long weekend and my description above is a very distilled version of the weekend. However, I learned one very valuable lesson.

Any idea, no matter how small or ridiculous you might view it to be has the power to become great if you are just willing to throw it out there and see what people say.

I never thought we would get as far as we did with our idea. But we did.

I never thought an idea that started out as a sex trophy case could turn into a viable prospect. But it did.

I never thought the experience would have such a profound effect on me. But it did.

My Takeaways

  1. Take a step outside the norm. It doesn’t even have to be outside your comfort zone. Just something different.
  2. You would be surprised what you can accomplish in 54 hours.
  3. Never limit yourself. Negativity and nay-saying could prevent you from seeing true value of something.

Oh, and if you’re going to pitch something – make sure you have some sort of a business plan. We didn’t and I’m sure it cost us winning the weekend. Not that I care because I came away from Startup Weekend learning things that are far more valuable than a first place finish ever would have been.

Extremely Simple Calendar Integration for Rails

Posted by mendicant – August 8, 2007

UPDATED 2011-05-06:

This is by far my most viewed blog post. Honestly, these days, I just use jquery-ui and the datepicker widget.

UPDATED 2008-11-19:

I didn’t update my blog for over a year, and as such decided to perform a reboot. The information previously contained on this page was out of date, and as such I didn’t keep it around. However, it turns out there’s a few places linking to this page, so I’ve decided to at least keep this from 404′ing.

The original blog post was centered around a plugin that you can now find at: http://code.google.com/p/calendardateselect

It really is a great plugin, and if you go to the site you’ll find it’s got very simple instructions on how to install and use it.

Good luck!

Update 2008-11-25:

Found the text of the old tutorial.

Today we’ll go over an extremely simple way to add a javascript/css calendar to your Rails app. We will be using the Calendar Date Select Plugin. It is a small, easy to use calendar based on the prototype library.

This was written back in the day for Rails 1.2, so take all this information with a grain of salt.

Installation is simple, and uses the typical installation syntax:
script/plugin install http://calendardateselect.googlecode.com/svn/tags/calendar_date_select

Voila! Installed!

Now, we just need to integrate it.

First, in your layout you need to add the javascript tag:
<%= calendar_date_select_includes “silver” %>

You can also use “red”, “blue” or “nil” for other color schemes.

Also note that you need to have prototype included as well, so if you haven’t already, you should also add the following to your layout:
<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

And now, we’re ready to use it! Usage is simple. I was using it to keep track of an expiry date for a property, so I used to the following tag:
<%= calendar_date_select_tag “property[expiry_date]“, @property.expiry_date.to_s %>

If you wish, you can also check out the demo section for more information on using it with Form Builder.

Finally, I didn’t like the default ‘natural’ syntax for the date “August 8th, 2007″, so I changed it to use my preference, hyphenated syntax. To do this, open your environment.rb file and add the following line:
CalendarDateSelect.format = :hyphen_ampm

There! That is all I needed to do. Of course, there are more options, simply adding a :time => true will allow you to have a time field as well. There are a few more configuration options available for the calendar. You can find out more and get some more screenshots by visiting the project’s homepage.

Cascading Selects in Rails

Posted by mendicant – July 18, 2007

Update 2008-11-19:

I would like to apologize. After not updating my blog in almost a year, I decided to perform a reboot. During that time I decided that the information contained in this post was not current and decided not to keep it. It turns out that some people were linking here, despite the fact that I had only written two posts! I was quite happy to learn that, but sad to find out you were all getting 404s now.

I’m sad to say that the information is no longer available, and I’m not able to rewrite it with some more current information. However, it looks like you can find a better and more up to date tutorial here.