• I released a Rails plugin named SimplySearchable, never got the chance to blog about it yet and still hoping to get the time to release a new version.
• I had the chance this year to present at RuPy, I did a 2 hours live hacking session demonstrating Rails agility in “Is Rails as agile as advertised?”.
• In the same trip to RuPy I visited Berlin for one day and took 4 days vacation in Prague after the conference. I had great times and took lots of photos there.
• Our startup SpinBits grew to be 6 people now, the team is becoming more complete with the join of great talented people.
• A couple of weeks ago we started a web related podcast named SpinShow, you can listen to the first episode here. The second episode will hopefully be up in the next couple of days.
• In March we (in SpinBits) organized the first DemoCamp Dubai, one of the great 4 demos presented was an online video platform we built called SliceJar. The event was successful so we’re organizing DemoCamp Dubai 2 now which will be on next Tuesday 29th of May, you are welcome to join us.
• The same SliceJar presented in DemoCamp Dubai 1 is now beta launched. Sign up now for beta account if interested.
• Currently I’m reading more on Git and RSpec to use them in the projects I’m working on.

That’s all for now and I hope the next post won’t be after another 3 months :)

If you follow Ruby and Rails blogs you may have heard about the little buzz around the book and David Heinemeier Hansson “politly resisting” permission to use the logo on the book. You can find more about this on RubyInside and Rethink.

I’m waiting to receive my copy next week, I’m sure it’s going to be a good read specially seeing all the time and effort Cloves invested in authoring it. Don’t forget to get yours.

Next Tuesday, June 26th 2007 we’ll meet at Dubai Marina Towers Walk, in Hakawati cafe starting at 8:00PM, so if you are a Rubyist, a Railer or just interested in Ruby or Rails, stop by and join us, the more we are, the more fun it’s going to be.

I thought that the lack of time was the reason that stopped me from blogging, but later on I realized that when you like something, no matter how busy you are, you will and should find time to do it. It seems that blogging was not one of my priorities lately but hopefully now it is, I miss blogging and interacting with other cyberspace friends, so no more lousy excuses, I’m back and back for good this time.

So maybe it’s time now to announce what’s that big thing that kept me hiding away for months, it all started when I met Cloves Carneiro Jr, an amazing Ruby on Rails master who recently moved to Dubai, after a couple of Rails meetups together we couldn’t help it and we both decided to start SpinBits to simply: webify with quality.

As you can tell I’ve been enjoying a lot of Rails goodness lately at SpinBits, I have a lot to share with you guys here, very interesting tips about Rails in general and Rails Edge in particular, so stay tuned.. but for real this time ;) .

Yes, it is the end, but not the end of laughter as in The Doors song, it’s just the end of my silence and the fresh start over of this website, with many things cooked up and ready to be served.

So I’m back, back with many things to talk about and discuss, back to complete the unfinished and continue the second year of this blog. As you know I started this blog last November in the CSS Reboot Fall 2005 with my oriental design, that year is over now and it was full of action like joining 9rules and rebooting again for Spring 2006 in addition to many successful posts. Here we start the second year together where things are just getting better and better and plans are getting bigger and bigger.

I finally want to thank you all, the reader of my modest blog. Without you I couldn’t accomplish any of this or be encouraged to keep on writing, thank you again and I hope you will read and enjoy more goodies here at ridaalbarazi.com.

“PuneRuby is a non-profit organization of individuals interested in developing, promoting, fostering, strengthening, and improving the Ruby programming language and Ruby community.” from PuneRuby’s About Page

PuneRuby (The Ruby community in Pune, India) with its founder Satish Talim are doing a series of interviews with famous Ruby gurus like James Edward Gray II (JEG2) the man behind Ruby Quiz, Peter Cooper of RubyInside and many other Ruby programmers from all over the world which I’m really honored to be in-line with by being interviewed there too.

It is really interesting to see Ruby programmers from all over the world getting interviewed in one place, all being asked the same questions like how they came to Ruby, why they chose it among other programming languages and many other interesting questions too.

“Art should be independent of all claptrap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.” by James McNeill Whistler

This movement included both literature and fine arts at that time but a while after people start to use this concept in different forms like Science for Science’s Sake and many others considering the wide meaning of art and what it can cover under its umbrella and so is the case with programming, which is an art, art of making beautiful and useful things. (I guess there no better quote than Graham’s here):

“What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.” Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

Programming isn’t the same to all programmers, some consider it an art and a craft while others consider it a painful process to earn a living, that’s why I think Graham wanted to distinguish between programmers and hackers. Hackers according to Graham are the architects of the industry, the software makers who make their masterpieces with creativity and style.

Does History Repeat Itself?

One of the main factors that encouraged the art movement at the time it started was the Industrial Revolution when many crafts and work types lost their meaning and purpose because of a machine or a factory alternative, for example painting became more into an abstract art instead of being just a way to image how things looked like; specifically after Photography rise, new ways and styles of painting appeared, schools formed and being an artist got a different meaning.

This is happening now after the Digital Revolution and the rise of Information Age, many types of work lost their meaning, businesses became much easier, faster and more accurate with computers and high-tech devices, some of these crafts became an art where the rest died, products and services we used to pay a lot of money to get are much cheaper now or even available for free sometimes.

Programming is the act of making software for a computer or any other digital device, it is a result of the digital revolution and what operates it. Here we notice the difference compared to the art case in the 19th century, programming is one of the major weapons of the digital revolution, programming makes alternatives to many work types in real life so they lose their purpose for a computerized alternatives, where art used to be the victim of the industrial revolution as mentioned earlier.

Programming and Art are similar in different areas and from different aspects, it is a different scenario that may force programming to face similar destiny of art and be done for its own sake.

The New Concept of Competition

Programming itself evolved extensively during the past few years, the number of programmers grew dramatically and making software became an easier process as well, many programming languages and frameworks, many communities and methodologies and a completely different market shares for new software development companies.

The existence of communities such as the Open Source community gave programming a special feature in sharing and understanding, which caused a higher level of knowledge and a very quick development approach, programmers start to learn from each other and share their knowledge to help each other do something better or to complete the undone and has to be done.

In the other hand market giants adopted different approaches, some encouraged open source while others didn’t where in both cases as giants they had a very good position to take decisions and direct the market. The existence of the giants and open source communities made programming a high level industry in which the ability to be one of the giants isn’t affordable so programmers either wished to work for the giants or develop a product or service that gets the attention of a huge company that could possibly acquire it.

In my opinion when programming as an industry reach such a level of complexity (market and philosophy wise) it is natural to find a group of programmers who make software for the sake of it and not to compete or anything, just for enjoying what they are doing and share it with others.

What is Programming’s Sake?

Programming for Programming’s sake is when you write the code with creativity and passion, not only to serve users or to earn your living from it. It is when you make the software for the happiness and joy it brings to your heart, applying your methods and spending enough time refining your masterpiece to let it express you and the art you represent without allowing any other factors to affect your craft.

No matter if the program you are doing is already made before or how simple it may sound, when you give it the artistic quality of your mind it will be different from any other one that has ever been made.

Enjoying what we do is something that we all wish to do but sometimes we are afraid to do it or unable to do it because we don’t want or unable to give or sacrifice anything for it, we don’t want to lose our lifestyle, we don’t want to go for less but the question is: How much are we able to sacrifice for something that we really enjoy?

The Thin Line

It may sound simple but it is not, when it comes to real life it’s very difficult to be able to do what you like, do it for the sake of it and be able to live with it. In the past this has created a completely new culture of Bohemianism where bohemians didn’t care about the money or traditional life behaviours but cared the most about their own art, doing it for the joy of it and sacrificing everything in a very ignorant way in return.

It is a very thin line that one should be careful before crossing when it comes to sacrifice, life is full of responsibilities but at the end of the day it’s not important how much you are earning but how happy you are in your life, living without regrets of any sacrifices you made in the past. So I’m not saying that you should always do the programming for it’s own sake because I know how difficult this is, specially if you make your living out of it, but a parallel stream with your work will make you happier with your programming and will even make your programs more artisitc.

This whole idea may sound too bohemian and crazy to some people, but with all the craziness it has in it, I really believe in it and I believe that such concepts is a primary step in the life cycle of every craft, I know it is a very tough road to go through and the idea itself still requires some refining in my head which I will keep on posting about until I reach its best shape. If you liked the idea or disliked it go ahead, share your opinion here and let’s discuss it free and loud…

The software market moved from being a stand-alone application market into a hosted web application market, not even a web application market, instead of just selling the web application as a script, software companies preferred to keep the script in-house and leasing it as a hosted service for a modest monthly rate, clients are no longer required to have a server to host their web applications, users don’t have to install any new softwares, they all can have it hosted and maintained by software providers themselves.

This new concept has exploded a really big boom, a lot of new buzzwords are showing up everyday and a completely new market has been created too, all under the umbrella of the main buzzword behind all of this, the one we all hear many times a day, it’s Web2.0.

The Positives

The webification move is positive for both clients and software providers, for clients it reduced the need for a higher resources and this “System Requirements” stuff, all information are portable now and available online all the time, all what the user need is an internet connection with a decent browser to enter his online world of web apps accounts, no matter what operating system or even what’s the machine used to access it.

For software providers webifing their applications has solved many old problems, like support and upgrades, with desktop applications they had to contact each customer for an upgrade and when a bug fix is released it had to be sent to all customers, but now when their application is a web hosted service, they have full control over the software that everybody is using at the same time, they can upgrade, fix and maintain everything from one single place, it has reduced the total delivery cost.

The internet got a completely new face with this new concept, and many problems got solved and really simplified, there are many articles and blog posts about the advantages so I won’t go any longer with them, I prefer to talk a little about the negatives as I didn’t really see enough talking about them.

The Negatives

It may seem very lovely this idea of having everything available online all the time, but this doesn’t hide the negatives it has, and here I would like to talk about privacy and the credibility of these software companies that host our information. After everything became online, all our information are hosted with software providers, calendars with gcal, bookmarks with del.icio.us, projects with basecamp, photos with flickr, emails with gmail and many other web apps, our personal data are spread all over the internet with those software companies.

For example Google knows about me more than my family does, logging my search history, having my emails, calendars and even spreadsheets, not to mention if I installed google desktop, they can have access to all my files. Does this feel right? I think we are trusting Google as long as they are maintaining their credibility with us but what about the rest?

Now the boom itself has created a big problem in the market, it’s really unbelievable the amount of new web applications that are coming online everyday, mostly solving the same problem but in a little different way, most of them are free, this is good for the user at some point but not for software companies, everybody want to start a small startup and do his own business so we ended with a flooded market with dead web applications that has been made correctly but didn’t get any users.

I want to ask all software providers and all the new startups, please don’t try to re-solve a solved problem, the world is full with problems to be solved, pick an unsolved one and solve it, let’s not repeat ourselves and be as useful as we can for ourselves and for the community.

Another minor disadvantage of the webification process is the high dependency on the internet, all our information are stored there, if anything goes wrong, and we are unable to get connected, we are completely isolated and unable to access any of our data.

At the end of the day I look to my operating system and see that it is very clean with no installed applications, in the other hand I see my browser with many tabs opened to do my work, access my data and interact with my friends, I guess I’m completely webified despite all the negatives I’ve talked about here and I think I really enjoy it but with at least with few concerns that always in mind.

In any project and in every company during the planning stage, the owners and the creators start by studying the markets and see the benefits of each one in order to decide their target.

Now talking about web business, markets aren’t the same as in other businesses, we have a different kind of globalization in cyberspace, better communication facilities and a much wider audience, which leave us finally to the users judgment, the users who have too many options and choose only what best fits their needs.

Local Market

Local market, which is in my scenario the Middle East in general, and UAE in particular is one of the most fresh online markets right now, a gold mine, a lot of open opportunities, many ideas to be implemented and different kind of problems that have to be solved, but still there are many difficulties that every local web startup is facing, sometimes it’s the monopoly between the big local web firms, and sometimes it’s the misunderstanding of the real needs of the local internet user.

Replicating and Translating

Most of the local web applications currently are either being translated or replicated from another international successful web applications, I could rarely find a really creative competitive idea in here, something that is made for the specific requirements of the local market, not just a replication of what’s out there.

Local startups have this wrong impression that if an idea has worked globally and internationally then it have to and will work here too, but unfortunately this is not the case, if the web application does not support the local language (Arabic for example) or doesn’t have too many users from the local market, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be reimplemented or translated, maybe it means that it’s not made for our needs in the first place.

When we’re talking about the local market we should do something that fit our needs and solve our problems not just follow the hype and see what can be re-done just to simulate the same success story of an international replica.

Lack of Knowledge

One of the problems in the local market is the lack of knowledge of the cyberspace basics, I’m not saying that there is NOBODY who knows about Web2.0 or the new trends for example, but I’m talking about the percentage of those who know to all other local internet users..

How many of those who heard about these trends do really understand the meaning, for example few days ago I received one of these yahoo groups email circulars, that has “Jewels of Knowledge” as its subject and one of these jewels was: “What programming language is GOOGLE developed in?” and at the end of the email the answer was “Google is written in Asynchronous java-script and XML, or its acronym Ajax”. This is just an example of the low level of knowledge circulated and its lack of accuracy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which programming language Google used, but in the other hand such level of knowledge should be raised, so the local internet users get a better understanding of what’s available and what they can get instead of just recycling what’s made for them and accept anything only because there is no alternatives.

Educating the internet users isn’t easy, and to give the right information is something very crucial, one of the most successful tries I’ve seen so far is Serdal a blog by Abdullah Al-Muhairi who has done a great job, writing and lecturing in Arabic about the new trends, demonstrating and explaining most of the new technologies, we need more of these tries, at least to build a solid knowledge background for the user to let him see what’s available and ask for more, ask for better.

The knowledge of the end user encourages the competition and makes the market more healthier, look at the Japanese market for example, the high level of basic internet knowledge every user have, they are always asking for more, and the competition became really harder, which made their products and services more enhanced and better shaped to give the users better satisfaction and more real solutions.

Low Level of Competition

Competition is the best motive to improve ourselves, you want to be better than your competitors so you start improving your products and skills, the more competition there is in the market the more healthier it is, and the better and competitive products and services will be.

Locally the competition is very low, sometimes it’s due to the outdated skills available and sometimes due to the monopoly of the big companies, those companies that insist on hiding the “lamp” and always trying to convince us that the “candle” is the only available mean of light.

There were and still are many tries to do something new, fighting all the way to deliver the best solutions available, but yet they are very few, few to the level that they are hard to find, I really find these tries very positive and sure they will be the pioneers or the local market and hopefully they will be more soon.

I hope the local market will reach the level of tough competition to have a better and healthier market, which will encourage us to join and compete by trying to deliver a better solutions instead of just being the first to copy these solutions from the international market.

Wider Audience

One of the best advantages of cyberspace now is the wide audience you can speak to and target, normally starting a business is limited to how far you can deliver your product or service to, which was very small circle in the past, but now in cyberspace, this start circle is big already, the easy access for the end users to reach your products and services by simply type the URL of your site to be in your world, your application is deliverable to every plugged user to the net.

Such an advantage should be used wisely, the solution of the problem should be generalized to serve a wider range of users not only for a specific country of city. When a web applications is served in Arabic for example, we are not targeting only a small city or even one country, but we are targeting every internet user who speaks Arabic wherever he/she is.

Why International Then?

So local or international? personally I chose the international market because I found it more beneficial to me than the local market, I’m not saying that the local market is not good, maybe it is a mine of gold, but not a mine of knowledge, at least not for me.

Internationally I find better knowledge and more competition which helps me develop myself and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, I couldn’t do this while working for the local market.

The tough competition and the variety of solutions available internationally always have motivated me to do more and learn more, not to mention the great opportunity of meeting new people with better knowledge that I can always learn from.

What about you? what do you prefer? working for the international market, or target the local market? and why?

In the last couple of weeks, in addition to the heavy work load I had, I was somehow busy minded, trying to figure out some answers for some interesting questions of life. These questions I had after reading Alberto Moravia’s Boredom novel, a very dark story about a very bored artist who had no connection to anything in life and could not realize the existence of anything neither, then he fell in love with a young model where the story begin to discuss several issues in a very psychological way, discussing money, love, suspicion, the existence of things and realizing them.. This feeling “Boredom” that we all passed through many times, but not as much as the artist in this novel, can anybody be that bored? Boredom is a novel that I recommend for everybody, and would love to hear your opinion about it here after you read it or if you have already read it before.

Reading Boredom forced me to have a deep thinking about this feeling, and try to find the philosophy behind it, but as per my reading list I started reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, the same novel that has been featured as a movie in the early 60s starring Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates, anyhow while reading this one I found myself sinking deeper in the sea of mysterious ideas specially with one of the questions that I faced in this book which was “Are you living as you will die tomorrow?” or “Are you living as you will never die?”, isn’t that a deep question? Even if you have an answer to it, after thinking about it, shouldn’t your daily tasks and life have some different meanings and understanding?

I was amazed and very touched psychologically, trying really to understand myself, and understand many other things, it was really very tough two weeks, questions, boredom, responsibilities not to mention the heavy work load I had as well. Anyhow thankfully I’m back now, with a better understanding of myself, my boredom and my life, cheered up and ready to review my drafts and finally publish them, so stay tuned and excuse my finished boredom.