I wanted to build an application where I could log my comic book reading habits to replace the paper system I was using. I had been mulling the idea over and just talking about various aspects with people for a month or two. On the second time I started to talk to Corey about my idea, I asked him what he thought about which user authentication gem I should use.

“Don’t worry about it. Start. Begin,” he replied.

Last night I was pairing with John on a feature for an upcoming release. I wanted to count the number of rows in a table so we could run analytics and track performance. I <3 metrics, ya know?

“Tim, this is simple. Why are you writing about this?”

select count(*) from messages;

And it is simple. If this were MyISAM. See, MyISAM always stores the number of rows on the table header. So, whenever we ask “how many rows are there?”, it can just grab the count and return it. Not InnoDB.

In InnoDB (for internal reasons), the number of rows has to be counted. Every single time. One of the tables we were counting was over 1.2 million rows. On a small EC2 instance with no other queries/major processes, this takes 1 minute and 20 seconds. This is unacceptable.

Tim will be presenting “300 Seconds of OAuth” at Ignite Orlando on Wednesday, March 4.  Ignite Orlando is a free event that brings individuals with like interests together for a night of learning, drinking and networking.  The event starts at 7pm and is being held at Slingapours in the Wall Street Plaza downtown.   So if you are in the Orlando area Wednesday night,  check out Tim’s presentation and meet up with other members of the Cloudspace agile team at Ignite Orlando!

Let’s say you’re a Cloudspace client. Let’s say you’re new to Agile. You’ve heard people talk about Agile; but how is it actually done?

If I had to give an executive summary, I’d say Agile is a way to sustainably manage projects for the long-term, while still keeping flexibility for the short-term.

Now, that’s a great piece of marketing, suit-and-tie-speak. And it’s useless for actually figuring out how Agile works. You want to know things like: Agile makes it easy to apply today’s lessons learned, starting next week — not at the beginning of next-year’s project. This means the person with the product vision (probably you) can re-evaluate and completely change the direction of a project in under a week.

“Congratulations Tim!”

Tim has been selected to do a presentation at acts_as_conference on Saturday afternoon about OAuth. He is in good company— speakers include: David Heinemeier Hansson, Yehuda Katz and Jon Larkowski. Since OAuth is a really cool thing that not too many people know how to implement, Tim will be doing a pretty introductory talk on the subject. From Tim’s presentation description:

Tim will talk about OAuth integration into Rails projects, cover the basics of OAuth for beginners, show how to istall OAuth to protect an existing project, how to protect controller actions with OAuth, and how to accept and use OAuth tokens from other providers.

Sounds like fun. Dave, Adrian, and I will also be attending the conference. Who else is going to be there?

Tim (Cloudspace’s agile director) and I spent most of last week in San Francisco kicking off a very cool new client project. It is a big, well thought out idea and there are a lot of different pieces and parts that have to work together in certain ways to enable the product’s special sauce. Under a rigid agile structure we couldn’t have possibly discussed all the nuances and subtlety to the idea before landing the job. It would have simply taken too much time and we would have been giving our work away for free.

Zentact is a really great networking assistance program that helps you keep in contact with people. Go sign up and then install the Firefox extension afterwards. You enter and tag your contacts and Zentact reminds you to reach out to a person by letting you know when you surf by a webpage that their tags indicate would be of interest. It is also cool because we built it!

Besides the website and the Firefox extension, Zentact has some really cool integration features with other services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Since we know you’re thinking about people when sending them email, it seemed like the perfect place to let you add and edit your contacts and their tags. Just take a look at this picture.

Zentact helps you network better and transforms your contacts into relationships. Cloudspace has been working with and building Zentact with Eric Marcoullier, Jared Brandt, and John Sampson. Just get your contacts in there, tag them and begin surfing the web; Zentact will let you know when you are on a page that is interesting to one of your contacts and give you the opportunity to reach out to them.

There are lots of people talking about it today:

• All those crazy folks on Twitter
• ReadWriteWeb
• Mashable
• Howard Lindzon
• VentureBeat

Check it out and let us know what you think, the system is still invite only but the links in this post are set up to let you right in.

Ryan Bates of Railscasts.com has just released a new screencast and it showcases the pure power of the Rails framework. In his new video, Ryan shows you how to create a blog in about 15 minutes. DHH did this eons ago with Rails 0.5 and Ryan’s new video is just as amazing now as DHH’s original video was then .  If you have a potential customer that needs to be convinced of just how quickly Rails allows you to turn ideas into business logic and code, just show them this video.

Tim and I are featured in the new Ruby Conf wrap up video (around minute 24) from Gregg of RailsEnvy talking about how Cloudspace is a wonderful place to work and the fact that we are hiring right now. We got to put our little ad into the video because we sponsored it and the next several RailsEnvy podcasts. We figured it was the best way to reach top notch rails developers as well as it being a great thing to support RailsEnvy because their weekly podcast is such a great contribution to the rails community.