It’s a time where one should take the time ( if not the whole year ) to go out and meet all your friends and family all over again. Talk about nothing, talk about future plans, exciting new relationships, adventures or problems. Talk about music, life, food, performances. Tell each other really bad jokes, and laugh with them just before you go to sleep. Learn to cook, learn to shoot with bow and arrow, learn to learn. Do something really, really stupid. Travel, see the world, see the people living on this world. Go out and have fun. Have fun in what you do, every day, with people you can talk with, about life, about the summertime…

On a more professional note: we are working / finishing a lot of different projects, which will be released over the next couple of months. Expect update soon, you must.

summerlove, henry

learn more about wabi-sabi

The opening talk was by one of the Github founders, Chris Wanstrath. He is the living evidence that developers can be rockstars. The tattooed, long haired geek explained how Github handles the awesomeness behind the scenes and the collaboration with Rails. A lot of plugin and Rubygem names past the revenue. It was a great talk, well brought, excellent vibe and if you don’t have a Github account yet, now’s the time to get one goddammit!

Next was José Valim, who gave us an excellent overview of the plugins and gems he uses to make his life a lot easier (or as José calls it: the plataforma way). Some names that caught my attention were Devise, Simple Form, Responders &Capybara (apparently the biggest rat in the world, even bigger than Webrat ^^).

The talks about document oriented databases by the guys from MongoDB & CouchDB were also mentionable. Mike Dirolf from MongoDB did an excellent explanation on what NoSql databases is all about. Although it’s hard to make the switch in the head, but with document oriented databases, we can let go difficult joins or other complex transactions. Jonathan Weiss quoted that this kind of databases are written for the web. JSON will be your main guide to transfer data around, and that is just music in the ears of a lot of developers! Although these technologies are relatively new, you don’t see it that often in production, but they’re definitely something to keep an eye on and sure worth playing around with!

Yehuda Katz was the man behind the mobile Rails apps topic. He talked about the pro and cons of current mobile devices and our possibilities as developers. The biggest concern most developers have is that the mobile story is going to be a struggle, a lot of browsers, a lot of differences on CSS & javascript support. Katz reassured that we’re not heading forward to another IE6 equivalent, because the mobile browsers are moving way faster than there computer variants. Mobile applications are also a big reason for everyone to pick up HTML 5 as soon as possible. A lot of problems can be solved easily and almost every browser is able to use the most of this technology or can deal with it and degrade it gracefully.

Carl Lerche brought us a roundup of what things we can expect from Rails 3. While he knew, he would be talking to a Rails loving audience, his talk scraped the surface and I think a lot of people were expecting some more underground insights. Also, they didn’t mentioned a release date, but we can’t blame these guys, if you see what Rails 3 is going to bring us, it will be worth waiting!

And the last talk, was by Jarkko Laine and was actually a great speech about perfectionism. We all know the problem that we start working an a great idea, but somewhere at the near end, we just can’t get it ready to launch. Jarkko’s advice: drop the details, and ship it! The only way your application can evolve is letting people use it, listen to feedback, and feed it on the road. It was nice to see, that everyone in the room was nodding along, and by the end of this talk, you really had the feeling of just releasing some beta projects of your own.

Overall a great meet up with like minded people from all over the world in a beautiful city.

We’ll definitely be at the next edition!

the beginning

It was a great place, and boy, if those walls could speak! Birthday parties, barbecue in the summertime, late-night-coding-sessions, … and of course some kick-ass working! ^^

Our wolfpack started with 2 lone wolfs, around 2006. We were looking for some interesting wolves to add to our pack. We found them and our little love-nest got too small after a while. So on the 1st of March 2010, we officially moved from our trusty beacon in the south of Antwerp, to a really nice place, located more in the heart of Antwerp. Here are some images of us packing up our stuff.

the move

The new place is still getting the final works done by us, so here are some random impressions and some feet on our new floor ( we simply LOVE our floor, it’s the best!! ).

the party

Moving means celebrating! So we did, you can check those pictures out on our flickr-page. We made a nice little slow-motion booth to boot! It was great fun, and we also made a quick edit. Hope you spot yourself!

the invitation

for the party, we also made an invitation, how else are you going to let people know? So yeah, here it is, there are some folding-it-open pictures on flickr, and also a making-of… We had a lot of fun folding every little confetti-bomb ^^

the conclusion

To end this post, we just want to say that we are really happy in the new office! Mr. Henry hopes to see you soon, for work or coffee! ^^

There is NO denying that these gentlemen have earned eternal stardom with their actions ( or was it their … ‘STACHES? ) We humbly tried to step inside those big shoes of our ancestors, men, manly men. We do this every year, it’s called SNORRENDAG, “moustache-day” in English. This will be our 3^th time of doing this annual event!

NOTE: some of our dear people at the office couldn’t make it today, kind of a big snow-disaster today in belgium ( traffic jams over 900km!! )

Wherever you are Elevators ( we like to call them like this ), we hope you enjoy them!!

And for those blasphemists out there, here are the 7 works…

1. Feed the hungry
2. Give drink to the thirsty
3. Clothe the naked
4. Shelter the homeless
5. Visit the sick
6. Visit the imprisoned
7. Bury the dead

Lots of love, jesus euh Mr. Henry

Thanks to everyone for dropping by, the couches were just enough to seat everyone. A special thanks to Klaas, Bartek (Poland) and Eugene (Russia) for lighting up the room with their vibrant words and visuals. We’ve uploaded some visuals, both static and moving!

Thanks to Tom van Sand for filming and editing the video, and thanks to Otman Fathi for taking some pictures while everybody was enjoying the show! Also, respect to our 2 swedish friends who joined us, Fred & Kristoffer you crazy Swedes!

All your media ( flickr / vimeo ) are belong to us! ( all the presentations are currently being uploaded to youtube Vimeo, so you can watch every session over and over again )

We hope to be able to do this some more, for the love of it! If you liked what you saw, and want to help us with sponsoring or donating your sexy body to us, please STAY IN TOUCH! ^^

Check out some Flickr

clickr for the flickr

Check out some Vimeo

video + editing by tom van sand

MONTAGE

SESSION KLAAS

SESSION BARTEK

SESSION BRAM

SESSION EUGENE

Thanks very much again to everyone for coming, and we hope to see you again pretty soon!

b-y-e

We have 4 European speakers. Topics include: Papervision ( Bartekd! ), image processing ( Eugene of Inspirit! ), a live vj workflow explained ( Klaas Verpoest ) and we‘ll give a little talk about Flex Development.

Besides these amazing speakers from Poland and Rrrrussia, we also have a truely, unique location: “Felix Pakhuis” ( browse the image gallery for pics ). It’s located in an old warehouse, next to the water ( and yachts ). ^^

You can visit the Meetup page and register ( it’s free! ) or just keep an eye on our blog-e-di-blog. We would really appreciate you registrating at the Meetup page so we can prepare ourselves for things to come. And besides: the registration pages of Meetup are really slick!

We’ll be talking about "Restfulx: Flex, Rails and Coffeebreaks". In 180 seconds. John doesn’t call us “Three Minute Wonders” for nothing.

Missing out on FOTB is a big mistake if you’re even remotely interested in Rich Internet Applications, digital art and / or looking for inspiration. Brighton, where it all takes place, is a city full of cosy restaurants, a lively vegetarian scene and loads of good music.

See you soon!

We’ve been getting cakes and cookies on such a regular bases, that we just needed to show our love! Just look at the little knight on his Speculaas Horse! Thanks for all the crunchy cookies and amazing cake Elien!

ps: her coconuts are great!! ( cakes that is )
pps: if anyone else wants to send us food, please do!!

He’s from the Netherlands, and we taught him about andalouse, the best sauce out there! Anyway, we gave him his total weight in this nectar-of-gods, that’s a staggering 70kg’s!!! Thanks for a great time Gilles, and come back soon! 

Please contact him if you want to throw a barbecue or something! ( don’t let him tell you he doesn’t have “tha soose” ( yeah he talks like that, because he’s mad gangsta yo! ) )

More info about our topic after the jump… ( clique-clique! )

view our slide + code page ( cool dev’s only! hehe )

RESTful^X

RESTful^X is a wonderful framework for Flex/Air which allows you to communicate with RESTful backends like Rails, CouchDB and many others. The framework is somewhat modeled after Rails as it uses ActiveRecord like model objects. It also separates the MVC layers very nicely.

From the backend’s perspective (we use Rails) you just send some (f)XML or JSON in response to the CRUD actions (including #index and #show) just like you would with any RESTful controller. Most of the time the standard controller scaffolds will do just fine.

Factoids

Let us take this opportunity to list some factoids about pirates and their traditions ( great fun! )

• the flag aboard a ship is called ‘Jolly Roger’. It comes in all kinds of different colors and figures, but the most famous one is ofcourse ( thank you Johnny Depp ) skull & bones, on a black background. That being very scary, sea merchants were happy if the flag wasn’t red, because that meant the pirates wouldn’t show any mercy… That’s also probably where the word ‘Jolly Roger’ came from. From the french ‘Jolie Rouge’ or ‘Pretty Red’… More
• the ship of a pirate could be about everything, the most important thing was that she ( yea, it’s a she ) would be able to move swiftly and precise, and attack quick. Now, they don’t just build a pirate-boat and pirates sure as hell won’t buy a boat. So in those days, the most common thing was to steal one. This could be anything that floats, they would add features. Think of pirates like the first tuning-people ( hold the spoilers, neon-light and spinners… hello cannons, extra sails etc… )

Post your pirate-facts below! ( and also anything about the actual arrrrcamp / restful x stuff : )

This is the feedback from OnePage Publishing on the georgette website:

We have been to the Georgette website recently and are very impressed with its creative and appealing design, in particular the lovely animation and navigation, with screens flying by, balloons and hearts that show the progress of loading, the scrollover taskbar below and of course, the presentation of the shoes, the option for a real-life view of the shoe on a real foot, and how they fall nicely into the shopping cart once you click Buy. The website is fun and aesthetically pleasing yet simple to use and intuitive, which is what we are looking for.

That’s like… a good review! ^^

Visit the 5-minute-one-pager now at www.posterliefde.be

We sincerely hope all the Belgians, Dutch, Australians, Americans, Portuguese and Danes enjoy their ink! ( If YOU are reading this, please take a picture of the paper on your wall and email it back to mother! )

Thank you!

We will post upcoming secrets projects, funny factoids happening in the office and much more! Over the course of the coming years, we’ll share a laugh, shed some tears… but we will always bring it true! ^^

from left to right: inge, bram, simon, yves, gilles, hans, jesus and henry in the middle
from left to right: anastasya, egor, ivo, vadym , yaki, gnat, jesus and henry in the middle

Here some food for the technical people among us: we’ve used the super-duper WordPress as our basis, and then DID EVERYTHING OURSELVES CUSTOM yeah yeah!! ^^ Look around and use our fuzz-filter, follow us on twitter, subscribe to the newsletter, stalk us on flickr, go out and have some fun and spread the word!

We wish everybody a brilliant 2009!

Thank you for reading