Last Thursday I was a part of the Scoopcamp hackathon and it was so great that I just couldn’t resist to write down some of my thoughts about it. Our team ThoughtWorks and friends a colorful mix of journalists, students and developers had a rough idea for a modern - more agile - journalism, where the journalist reporting about an ongoing event writes the background story and live updates from his perspective, but can also incorporate content written by the readers who create their own streams representing their own take on the particular event. Being able to see which stream/entry is getting most likes (=feedback), he/she can quickly react and focus on the currently favorite perspective. During a quick brainstorming we came up with the name: LiquidPub (for liquid publishing) and started defining the first user stories. Our app To be able to deliver something within less than a day of coding, we went with Ruby on Rails. This gave me the opportunity to finally try out Rails and learn it a bit by pairing with some experienced Ruby/Rails devs. The application itself has been deployed on heroku and being ThoughtWorks we built and deployed it after each push to our github repo using snap-ci - continuous delivery FTW! ...

Back in 2009 I became the job to design and start realizing a quite large web application for a health care research project. I took some time, sat down and thought about the technology stack, I would like to use to build it. As we wanted to have an RIA and I already had some experience with GWT, we quickly decided to use it. Since then four years have passed and we are about to release the 2.0 version of our system. During this time, the whole team learned a lot about GWT, its advantages and also some disadvantages, and I thought it would be useful to write some of them up. This part is about the status quo, in the second part I will try to write about a GWT setup I would go for, when starting the project today - so if you have any hints in this regard, please feel free to leave a comment, I would definitely appreciate it! ...

There’s nothing like this moment, when you have a big smile on your face, because you’re just stunned how well things are working and how simple the set-up process was. Octopress is just amazing. Period. If you haven’t heard about it and you’re thinking to start a blog or migrate one, then you should definitely check it out. To put it simple: Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll, the blog aware static site generator powering Github Pages. To start blogging with Jekyll, you have to write your own HTML templates, CSS, Javascripts and set up your configuration. But with Octopress All of that is already taken care of. Simply clone or fork Octopress, install dependencies and the theme, and you’re set. - Brandon Mathis http://octopress.org/blog/2011/07/23/octopress-20-surfaces/ ...

I had this idea to create my own blog since like forever but always convinced myself that it will be either too time consuming or all the topics I would like to write about, are already well described, so what’s the point … But then, I had also too many moments, when I thought - wait, you already had this problem/issue/idea… What was the solution? Where did you find it? ...