I was at Barcamp Southeast at the weekend. It was a very interesting day. In fact it was almost too interesting. I didn’t get to see all the talks I wanted to see and I didn’t get to talk to all the people I wanted to talk to. Well done to the organizers - I’m looking forward to the next one already!

My Talk

I gave an introductory overview of full-stack MVC web frameworks: Rails, Django and Turbogears. I wasn’t particularly happy with how the talk went. I hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare in the previous days, I started late and then I rushed through a lot of my slides - I think I even missed some of the points I had on the slides. Nevertheless there was a good crowd, a lot of questions and a lot of interest in the topic.

Ruby interest

There were a lot of people who are interested in learning rails but haven’t yet made the jump or have heard a lot about rails but weren’t sure if they should go and learn it.

Rails was also discussed in the panel discussion on starting a web service company. Of the five companies on the panel, one was using rails (Touristr [1]) and one was using turbogears (LouderVoice [2]). Interestingly both of them outsourced their development to people outside Ireland and both had difficulty sourcing developers within Ireland. (If you’re a freelancer in Ireland and looking for work make sure you’ve added your details to Working with Rails [3] and joined the Ruby Ireland mailing list [4].)

Other talks

Laurence Veale [5] gave a talk on Personas [6]. Personas are a way of representing different user types for your site and using these as part of your user interface and site design. See Laurence’s notes [7] for more details.

Paul Watson [8] gave a talk on using rails outside it’s comfort zone. This discussed how to use rails when you are not following the standard rails conventions. I found this interesting but these are issues that you generally don’t encounter until you’ve been using rails for a while. I think most of the people in the audience were people who were interested in rails but not using it.

T J Macintyre [9] gave a talk on the law surrounding ownership of software. If you write a piece of software, who owns the rights? This is not something I had given a lot of thought to and I found this talk extremely informative. Some of what was covered: code ownership and copyright, exceptions (employees, implied agreement, joint authors, partnerships), database rights and steps to take to ensure there is no ambiguity over who owns what.

The first panel was on getting money for your startup. This was very informative but a bit depressing. The main thing I took from this is that it is very difficult to get money for a startup in Ireland. You should expect to self finance (savings, loans, friends) the early stages of your company. When you get to the stage where you have a product and paying customers then you have a chance of getting investment.

The second panel was on starting a web services company in ireland. On the panel were Joe Drumgoole (PutPlace [10]), Conor O’Neill (LouderVoice [11]), Walter Higgins (Pixenate [12]), Jan Blanchard (Touristr [13]) and Helene Haughney (Zinadoo [14]).

LouderVoice is build using turbogears and Touristr uses rails. I think Pixenate is built with perl and the others didn’t mention what technology they are using.

Both Conor and Jan mentioned that they had difficulty sourcing developers in Ireland. Jan told of being quoted 150k from one Irish web dev firm before getting a much cheaper quote and a much better response (page diagrams and flexibility on specifications) from an American company. They happened to be a rails shop and this is how he ended up using rails. (This is a common problem in ireland - a lot of web design companies overvalue what they do. They have a big company mentality and with that comes big company prices.) It’s interesting the company that gave Jan the best value were using rails. A company using rails (or turbogears or django) should be cheaper because the project should take a lot less time using these frameworks. They should also be more responsive as the philosophy behind these frameworks encourages small teams and agile, iterative development.

It was interesting to hear each company discuss their business models. These included advertising (all except putplace), mobile sms share and domain registration (zinadoo), white labelling and selling customization of the software (pixenate, zinadoo) and charging a monthly fee (putplace).

Other reviews

Here are the other reviews I’ve seen so far:

• Ken McGuire [15]
• Laurence Veale [16]
• Adrian Smith [17]
• Conor O Neil [18]
• Paul Watson [19]
• Michele Neylon [20]
• James Corbett [21]
• Damien Mulley [22]