The OPEN 2010 conference was very well organized and had many interesting talks.

The side of low level, infrastructure things was presented by people from Red Hat, VMWare and IBM. The buzz words “SaaS”, “PaaS” and the likes were all over the place together with recent hot topic of virtualization.

On the application level there were interesting presentations about Django, PostgreSQL. And of course our own presentations on Ruby, Rails, NoSQL along with a longer, 2 hours “Introduction to Ruby” workshop.

The food was great too. That’s important.

We uploaded our slides with english transcription for some of them on the “we speak” page.

We are giving 4 out of 20 sessions at Open 2010, an Israeli open source conference.

Michael is giving the last keynote and me and Boris will be opening 2 of the 3 tracks: open startup and open enterprise.

I’m going to talk about “NoSQL, when, why, and how” and Boris is giving an introduction to Rails, web development that doesn’t hurt.

After the tracks we will also have a long 2 hour Ruby and Rails workshop.

See you there ;)

P.S. btw, Astrails is sponsoring this event together with a couple of smaller companies like IBM, Red Hat and VMWare :)

P.P.S. Big thanks goes to Raphael Fogel and People&Computers for organizing the whole thing.

http://markupslicer.com

Supports ERB and HAML for now, vote on site for more formats.

Beautifully crafted, totally free and it’s kinda fun.

We originally came with the idea to skip this dull and dirty manual parsing and thought that others might find it useful as well.

Play with demo project and tell us how was it.

Simple Object persistency library for Cassandra

• Home: http://astrails.com/smallrecord
• Code: http://github.com/astrails/smallrecord
• Blog: http://blog.astrails.com/smallrecord

Motivation & History (you can skip it :)

I was developing an multiplayer online game for a client (TBD: link when released :) and we decided to use Cassandra for performance and scaling benefits. Also the game’s internal data structures mapped very well to key-value semantics.

I did some research but couldn’t find anything that was Ready at the time to be used for development.

About a week ago about 15 people were gathered in People and Computers offices thanks to Raphael Fogel.

Jerry Cheung, nice guy from Outspokes, told everyone how Outspokes was built from the inside and shared his view on building javascript intensive application with Rails as a backend.

Outspokes uses fancy javascript to allow in-browser collaboration of development/design/client teams to request changes, track progress and report problems on ongoing project. I definitely will try it out.

Boris Nadion from Astrails (that’s us in case you were wondering) told the story of our own MarkupSlicer - free to use project we wrote to simplify creating ERB/HAML layouts and partials out of HTML markup we get from our slicing team.

Vitaly Kushner, also from Astrails, made a nice intro presenation about Cassandra - our choice of NoSQL breed. We working with yet to be disclosed client on very technologically challenging project and cassandra is one of many interesting solutions we working with (You can expect a case study on this project in couple of months, as soon as it will go public).

Cassandra Intro presentation

There is a new (0.2.7) version of Astrails-Safe.

New features since 0.2.5:

• default options for gpg now include '--no-use-agent'
• support for 'command' option for gpg
• quote values in mysql password file
• add 'lib' to $:
• [EXPERIMENTAL] Rackspace Cloud Files support

If you follow us on twitter (@astrails if you wondering) you already know that we are at the Startup Weekend Israel right now.

Which is going amazing by the way, thanks for asking, lots and lots of nice people, very creative and energetic atmosphere, food and beer.

Turns out our idea attracted a great team of developers, designers and business developers.

Startup Weekend comes to Israel.

The event will take place at IBM offices in Petch Tikva from Dec-16 to Dec-18. We are going to participate and also sponsor the event.

Startup weekends are known to be a good place to network with all those startup people, like enterpreneurs, VCs, lawyers, developers and designers.

Israeli event seems to be kosher, so it’s not exactly a weekend: Wed - Fri :-) Grab your discounted ticket using discount code swearlybird, and as they say you should bring “laptop, good attitude, and creative energy” there.

Follow Startup Weekend Israel tweets to stay updated.

We will tweet our impressions and blog about them here.

Looking forward to have some geek fun.

This is going to be the first part of a blog post series about javascript widgets.

First type I’m going to cover is Popup Widget. Sometimes it’s called Popin Widget because there is no actually new window that pops up, instead the content is shown IN-side a current page. The idea is quite simple: you provide some html/js snippet to other sites. They put it into relevant place, and you have some functionality of your site running there.

I’m going to explain how exactly it works, what should be done to achieve this, and what common mistakes i see once and again.

At the end of the blog post you will get a link to complete javascript library, grab it, play with it, and use it for fun or profit.

Everyone needs a backup, right? Unfortunately almost no one does though. Why?!

We needed something for ourselves and our customers. Something simple, free, configure-and-forget. Most of the time there is no need for something fancy, a simple tar + mysqldump can do the job for many small/medium sites.

We participated in JRuby on Rails with GlassFish Code Camp hosted by Sun Microsystems Inc. I was speaking about the framework in general trying to infect Java developers with Ruby On Rails. Slides are available.

Amit Hurvitz gave exciting presentation about GlassFish and short introduction into DTrace. Find out more details about the Code Camp.

2008 was the year when we finally switched to full time consulting. And like all consulters we faced the problem of correct pricing. There are two well-known ways to charge a customer: per-hour rate and fixed bid quote, and several combinations of them.

Blog moved to Mephisto. So we have comments now.

We just incorporated our own Ltd. company.

It was coming for a while now but we finally got to it when we started to hire people :)