Limerick OpenCoffeeClub

Just back from the Limerick OpenCoffeeClub meetup in the Absolute Hotel. Had a great time, met loadsa cool folks, got away with a nifty TouristR t-shirt and saw the work of a marketing team who have not been to Limerick recently:

All in the same day!

We hung around in the bar initially as people trickled in. Patrick and I got chatting to some of the other early attendees. Met lots of fellow EI-haters (always fun!) and also spent lots of time with the TouristR crowd. Conor, Jan and Juanita are making a really cool site. They also have a mascot for their site called TR who’s reminiscent of the reddit alien and changes for every country. Lovable little feller.

After a while we went into the Brainbox room, and talked about Auctomatic and our experiences in the valley. It was cool giving the chat to all the Limerick OCC attendees, but the awesome thing was Conn O’Muineachain streamed it live to Ustream.tv (link).

Once or twice people posted questions for us on the live Ustream chat. I could feel the head inflating!

We also got to chat about Smalltalk, Seaside, and how incredible they are for building web applications. Hopefully we may have sparked some interest in the subject. Who knows, maybe Limerick might evolve into the first big Seaside hub – three more converts and Limerick will have the largest concentration of seaside developers in the world!

Patrick managed to make it through the whole chat without hating on Rails too much. You could say Auctomatic has a love-hate relationship with Rails – I love it, Patrick hates it. I think he suffered some deep emotional trauma from an RDBMS in his earlier years and still hasn’t gotten over it. I like Rails for being able to write my code in TextMate instead of a VM (and not having to end lines with semicolons like certain other languages who shall remain nameless). As Harj said: “I want to be able to type rails foo and make it seem like I’ve done lots of work”.

Afterwards, we hung out in the cafe. It was cool to be able to drink smoothies talk to lots of people who I’d previously only known from their twitters!

In other news, I’ve just gotten my provisional license so hopefully I’ll be able to drive to the next Limerick OCC meeting in two weeks time!

Slightly more substantial post

Scenes from the Auctomatic apartment

1am: The four of us are seated around our 2 metre square desk. None of us can see each other, because there’s monitors in the way. None of us can talk to each other because we all have noise-isolating earphones in. All four of us are on the #auctomatic channel on irc.freenode.net, discussing the site. Someone says “so, what’re we going to do about dinner?” and the discussion goes there.

1:30am: It seems so unreasonable that all pizza places be shut at this hour. I mean come on?

2:00am: Playing soccer in the apartment. Airbed for a goal, kickboxing handwrap for a ball. Nearly trip and fall onto our new Dell servers strewn on the floor. The ball goes wide and hits Patrick’s monitor. We play on. The ball goes wide and flies out the open window, landing near the fountain five stories below. The games stops.

All web development should be like this.

Recently started using Firefox + Web Developer Toolbar + Firebug for when I’m working on frontend stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Being able to inspect your elements, find out where they’re getting their style and edit the CSS in the browser seem like features I could never do without.

Irish Times writeup

Whip out page six of the Business section of today’s Irish Times folks, and you’ll find a lovely article about Auctomatic. For those of us who aren’t subscribers (why do the Irish Times do this? Beats me.), Patrick’s posted a screenshot here.

</shameless self promotion>

Work

I realise I’ve been posting mostly about aspects of life like food and blagging my way into things up to now. It’s high time for a post about how work on Auctomatic (the reason I’m here, after all) is going.

Working towards launch

Patrick and I have been churning out code at a fair rate to get things ready for launch. It’s maddening, because we’re 99% there, and have been for the last week. Things tend to take so much longer when you’re not allowed bugs and things have to work in Internet Explorer 6. Indeed, many times I’ve considered our homepage redirecting to getfirefox.com for IE6 users. Harj has been giving our site a complete makover and doing a seriously impressive job. Our frontend pages (non-logged in, that is) our now very pretty:

Harj and I are now turning our attention to finalising details of our app’s interface. The big problem with all our competitors is their interfaces are horrible and clunky. From the feedback we got at eBay Live, people seem to really like ours. One powerseller gave Patrick a hug after he demo’ed the app to her. It’s even going to be better than the iPhone’s UI. There, I said it!

Nostalgia

Before we went to eBay Live! in Boston, Patrick spent a lot of time setting up the servers. We decided to name our architecture after villages in Tipperary to maintain our links with Ireland. It sounds odd to hear “incoming requests will hit the lighttpd server on Puckaun and be redirected to Killaloe, Ballina or Portroe.” I’m hoping our cables between machines have N7 written on them somewhere for extra meaningfulness.

Getting things done

Yesterday I had a problem with Seaside linking to a stylesheet multiple times (don’t ask). After 15 minutes I gave up and decided to ask Patrick. He wasn’t on MSN and I was about to email him asking him to when I realised I prod him onto MSN a lot – the time I spend sending him emails to go on is an inefficiency. I decided to write a script to be able to poke members of the Auctomatic team from the command line. After 15 minutes of debugging (I could have sworn it was chomp that takes off trailing new newlines. Maybe I was just hungry) it was finally working and at my shell I simply had to enter:

$ poke p

Of course, emailing him would have just taken 10 seconds more so I’ll have to do a lot of poking before I can chalk this up as a saving.