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Peter Marklund's Home |
Introducing Rails Mentor
Me and fellow Rails developer Carl-Johan Kihlbom from Gothenburg have just founded Rails Mentor. Rails Mentor is a network of Ruby on Rails experts and we offer mentorship and training in anything related to Ruby on Rails. Me and Carl-Johan are committed to Rails best practices and together we have a broad experience of applying Ruby on Rails to varying types of projects. Now we would like to help spread this knowledge to others. If you need to be brought up to speed quickly with Rails or need a code or architecture review, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.
We are currently at RailsConf in Berlin and we are giving free Rails Mentor t-shirts so come talk to us if you want one!
Hype and the Rise and Fall of Programming Languages
Steve Yegge has written an article on Ruby as a competitor to Python, the Rails hype, and the rise and fall of programming languages. The article touched me deeply. Thanks to Olle Jonsson for sending the link. The article is almost a year old but should still be relevant. I especially like the last section on Ruby:
"The worldwide Ruby culture is the warmest and friendliest I've seen in my long history with programming languages. And Ruby is a sweet language. Other people seem to agree, and are taking steps to market it, which is getting them labeled as "hyper-enthusiasts" by the Sour Grapes camp. It appears to me that Ruby is doing what I wanted Python to do a few years ago, so I've finally learned Ruby and have switched most of my development over to it.
Starting a Startup - Hard but Doable
Here are some encouraging words from Paul Graham's How to Start a Startup article (which will make you scroll through eternity):
"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable."
Interesting to see the Web 2.0 Startup Toplist as well for a list of successful startups.
From Paul Graham's Y Combinator:
"Y Combinator relies on certain premises: that open-source software and falling hardware prices means that tech start-ups are cheap to finance; that large companies are no longer at the forefront of innovation; and that mature technology companies find it cheaper to buy than to build."
Search is Big but Microsoft is Bigger
In Teknisk uheld i Microsofts Google-udfordrer danish ComputerWorld writes about Microsoft's new enhanced search service based on Yahoo/Inktomi technology that is to take on Google. Supposedly the new search service has cost 600 million danish kronor to develop. That is small potato for Microsoft though where the MSN division has a turnover of a mere 2 billion danish kronor compared to 211 billion for the whole company...
Swedish IT Educations No Longer In Demand
Why Headhunters Like Me
Sometimes I think I should change career path slightly... In the last two weeks I've been contacted twice via phone and email by different headhunters searching urgently for SAP ABAP programmers. In an attempt to explain those flattering and unexpected invitations I noticed that if you google for "ABAP programmer copenhagen" or "ABAP programmer stockholm" my CV will show up on the first result page.
Of course, the headhunters were in quite a hurry to contact me since if they would have read my CV carefully they would have seen that my SAP experience is limited to less than half a years time directly following my university graduation...