Ben's a proud papa -- both to his first baby (girl), and now (officially) to his first book, Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects, which recently started shipping from Amazon and will be in bookstores starting next week. He's spoken nationally and internationally in the Rails community, and has been authoring the book since October 2007.
Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects is a guide to joining the burgeoning world of open web applications. It argues that opening up your application can provide significant benefits and involves you in the entire process—from setting up your application, to creating clients for it, to handling success and all its attendant problems.
- This book is the essential resource for anyone who wants to make their web application a full participant in the new Internet.
- This book is intended for intermediate–to–advanced Rails developers—people who use Rails regularly for sites and applications more complicated than the prototypical roll–your–own blog.
- In particular, it’s targeted at Rails developers who want to be good Web 2.0 citizens—sharing the functionality of their app with other sites to the betterment of everyone.
- Application projects include iPhone, Facebook, and REST for the enterprise.
Ben will briefly tear himself away from his new parenting duties tomorrow when he presents “Domain Modeling with REST” at 7 p.m. to more than 20 confirmed attendees at the Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade (raleigh.rb).
For some time now, REST has been the One True Way to build Rails applications. Unfortunately, though, RESTful design is often easier to aim for than it is to achieve. Complex domain modeling with resources can be a challenge, and the implementation of REST in Rails itself can cause unexpected problems. In this talk, I’ll be discussing these issues and more. By the time we’re done, you’ll be ready to build the RESTful systems you’ve always dreamed of—or, at least, make your applications simpler to build, maintain, and integrate with the rest of the web.
Our very own Clinton R. Nixon‘s proposal for a tutorial entitled, “Extending Rails: Understanding and Building Plugins,” was accepted this week to O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention 2008! OSCON—which will be held in Portland, OR, July 21-25—welcomes more than 2,500 people each year and selects only 40 tutorials. Clinton is “more than a little excited” to lead his three-hour tutorial at the premier gathering of open-source developers in the world.
Congrats, Clinton!
A team of Viget folks spent a long weekend in Texas for South By Southwest. We saw some interesting panels, reunited with folks we hadn't seen in months or since last year, and got to meet and talk to dozens of folks we hadn't ever seen. It was definitely a great time, but it was also lacking a lot that we look for in a great event, especially one being paid for by our professional development budgets.
Continue reading "Building a Better SXSW"
FALLS CHURCH, VA – M. Jackson Wilkinson, senior strategist at Viget Labs, will cross the pond to participate in an Agile design panel discussion at the Webdesign International Festival in Limoges, France, April 17-19, 2008.
"This is my first overseas talk and I’m really looking forward to it," he said. "I think it’ll be a great opportunity for me to interact with a lot of bright people and share some of the things that we do very well here at Viget."
Wilkinson submitted a proposal on Agile design in early January and, after learning it had been accepted, immediately began brushing up on his French.
We last redesigned viget.com almost two years ago. As part of that effort, we launched the FourLabs blog, dedicated to sharing “insights and commentary reflecting the four key aspects of our work: strategic consulting, interactive design, application development, and online marketing.” We also noted that it was “ever-evolving” and today, “it” has evolved substantially. Multiplied might be more like it.
We found over the past 22 months that writing for the FourLabs was hard because of you, frankly. Who are you? A designer? Developer? Marketer? We found our readers to be each of these, but not all of them. That made blogging tough. A post about code couldn’t be too techie for fear of scaring off the design readers. A post about UX need to define what UX is if we expected the non-UX folks to keep reading. You get the idea. A good rule for blogs is to know your audience and stay focused. We were trying to be broad ... but no more!
Today, we’ve launched five blogs, one for each of the four labs (strategy, design, development, and marketing) and a newly focused FourLabs blog. FourLabs is all about us - our work, our clients, our team - and is written for those who care to follow what’s happening at Viget (and thank you for caring!).
Our niche blogs are all about you.
- VigetAdvance, our web strategy blog, will focus on web start-ups, new product launches, and how the web continues to transform every business.
- If you’re a designer, keep up with VigetInspire and the thoughts our design team have about stuff like user experience, web standards, and Flash as well as notable site launches and events like SXSW.
- If you’re a developer, we hope you’ll enjoy VigetExtend and our development team talking about open source, Ruby on Rails, test driven development, and events like RailsConf.
- Marketers should check out VigetEngage, where our marketing team will share tips and ideas on search, email, and social media marketing as well as analytics.
If you think you’d kinda like to follow all four of these, no problem—just keep keepin’ up with FourLabs, where we’ll have a week digest of what’s covered in each, or join our email list for a monthly update.
By launching these focused blogs, our growing team here at Viget can more effectively connect with their peer communities. We can share ideas and generally contribute to the vibrant and ever-expanding industry that we’re all in. And since each Lab here at Viget shares knowledge between them, we think our perspective will be a little unique. We hope you do too!
You’ll notice they each have a different look, and none really look much like Viget.com or even reflect our branding. That’s no accident! We’ll write most of the posts (though guest bloggers are welcome) but we want the content and discussion to be about you, not us. FourLabs will continue to cover all things Viget.
Will this plan work? One blog is hard enough to keep up on—will we be able to sustain five of them? The only thing we can promise is that we’ll give it our best shot. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions!
One more thing: kudos to Rob, Doug, and Steph, who led the charge here at Viget to get all this put together while juggling plenty of client work. Internal projects are notorious for slipping, but these guys were dedicated to getting this done in time for SXSW. Nicely done!
This content originally appeared as a press release on viget.com, and has since been adapted for our FourLabs blog.
FALLS CHURCH, VA – Senior Developer Ben Scofield will be taking Portland, OR, by storm in May when he presents "Advanced RESTful Rails" at RailsConf.
"I hope that the audience will become more comfortable using RESTful principles to model solutions to complex problems, and that they’ll be better prepared to deal with some of the shortcomings in Rails’ support for REST," Scofield said.
The conference – which runs from May 29-June 1, 2008 – brings together the largest number of Ruby and Rails developers in the world.
"It’s the best place to go to stay abreast of current developments and meet smart people from all over the place," he said. "Being able to speak there is just a bonus, really."
This content originally appeared as a press release on viget.com, and has since been adapted for our FourLabs blog.
FALLS CHURCH, VA – Web designer Samantha Warren’s blog, BadAssIdeas, is a finalist in the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web Awards. Finalists in that category are, "Sites that revolutionize the power of publishing by providing regularly updated content of a personal or professional nature."
Continue reading "Warren’s Blog Marked SXSW Design Finalist"
This content originally appeared as a press release on viget.com, and has since been adapted for our FourLabs blog.
FALLS CHURCH, VA – Senior Developer Clinton Nixon, Director of Development Patrick Reagan, and CEO Brian Williams spoke about a creative recruiting trend when they were featured in Computerworld’s "Rock Star Coders" article, which was published on Jan. 22, 2008.
The trio discussed the benefits – and drawbacks – of a new wave of equating developers to rock stars in an attempt to reach unique people looking for exceptional companies that are committed to employees’ personal and professional growth.
Continue reading "Nixon, Reagan, Williams Featured in Computerworld"
This content originally appeared as a press release on viget.com, and has since been adapted for our FourLabs blog.
FALLS CHURCH, VA – Patrick Reagan, Development Director at Viget Labs – a dynamic, web consulting company based in Falls Church, VA – will see his Rails recipe, "Custom Response Formats," published in May 2008 in Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark and the Pragmatic Programmers. A beta .PDF of the book has just been released.
"We’ve been working heavily with Rails for application development for awhile," Reagan said. "So it’s great to be recognized for my work both in and outside of Viget."
So, what’s it about?
"Typically, when users interact with a web application they are presented with a format that they can view in their browser, like HTML. This doesn’t have to be the case: this recipe shows how easy it is to push different data formats to the user. MP3 in this case; but, others are possible."
Continue reading "Reagan to Have Rails Recipe Published"
