Novelys

New open source contributions

yannski — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:49:39 +0000

Novelys’s engagement in Open Source is undeniable. We define ourselves as a part of the open source ecosystem. You can find our names in several projects hosted at Github.

Today, we announce 2 new projects written by one of our mighty interns Frédéric Maquin.

Pure Javascript Picture Gallery for Titanium

This pure javascript picture gallery provides you with a ready-to-use gallery, made of two components. A gallery of thumbnails, in which the user can quickly check pictures and a scrollable gallery of pictures, opened when the user touch one of the thumbnails. It works on both iOS and Android.

https://github.com/novelys/titanium-picture-gallery

Android Jpeg Encoder for Titanium

By default, Titanium encodes jpeg image with the highest quality possible, sometimes resulting in heavy files sent through the network. JpegEncoder provides a small set of functions to scale, crop and compress an image. Jpeg Encoder only works on Android platforms.

https://github.com/novelys/titanium-jpegencoder

Feel free to give your opinion on these 2 projects and… Contribute !

Tomorrow is gonna be a spike

yannski — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:55:41 +0000

A few days ago, a wannabe customer came to us to get a quotation for his startup project.
Our analysis went straightforward for the most part, and we could get some numbers in front of the customer’s expectations. However, for one key piece of the webapp, the customer wanted a precise experience for his users. The page is full of AJAX call to external APIs. Of course, planning is guessing, but for this tricky part, we wanted to be as accurate as possible and to be sure that we could achieve the experience the customer wants.

That’s why we go for a spike. In the agile and eXtreme Programming world, a spike is a very small program or webapp especially designed to leverage solutions for a tough problem and just the solutions to this specific problem. Usually, from this spike you can guess the correct design or technical solution and thus, estimate how long it will take to really build them and integrate them in the final live app.

In that specific case, of course, it’s dangerous on the business point of view. We’ll spend a few days and we’re not sure we will get the contract. But we think it’s definitively worth it: at the end of the day, we will get clear answers to our questions and we can even show this specific prototype to the customer and hope he will choose us.

Furthermore, this type of experience is really good to build our team spirit and be sure we keep being on the edge!

So tomorrow, we will be two, coding in the Ruby War Room at our coworking space

Cockatoo, a simple chat server using EM and the Long Polling technique

yannski — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:45:20 +0000

We’ve just open sourced a simple chat server we wrote a few months ago, Cockatoo.

It’s using the fantastic EventMachine (yep, we know that node.js is the new kid in town, but well…). Several “push” technique exists, but we focused on Long Polling as it’s very easy to setup, be it on the server or the client side.
Screenshots :

We’ve also made a little presentation on “Long Polling with EventMachine” :

MasterSieve, our first internal product

yannski — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:41:04 +0000

After a few months of hard work, frustrations, good and bad decisions, we’ve finally released MasterSieve (our first internal product), a web application dedicated to projects management using agile methodologies. Although, this version is public, it’s in private Beta for the moment which basically means that only selected users can access the app for the moment.

You’ll find here the usual suspects: milestones, tickets, roadmap, timelines, etc. You may say: “nothing fancy !”. Well, we were pretty pleased with Trac in fact. But as the number of projets grew up, it became difficult to maintain. Besides, the UI is not really accessible for our customers and we really like our customers to participate deeply in their product creation. We want them to enter tickets directly and we want them to see directly how their project is progressing. That’s why we created MasterSieve.

On the technical side, MasterSieve is built using Rails 3, MongoDB and jQuery. And for the first wireframes, we worked with our friends of FFunction, a Montreal company specialized in UI/UX, to sort things out.

BTW, we’d like to pitch MasterSieve at Start in Paris, the french community event for startups, so, please, vote for us!

Why Novelys sponsored Euruko ?

yannski — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:58:34 +0000

As the Euruko 2010 videos are now online, a resume of the event is now up on Ruby Inside. With a nice quote regarding our sponsorship :

The organizers asked me to specially thank their biggest sponsor Novelys – a team of French Ruby on Rails experts.

Just a quick note on why we sponsored Euruko. First, I have some polish blood in my veins. More seriously, we’re always happy to sponsor tech events related to how we work at Novelys. We contribute open source code but we’re also engaged in open source tech events. Furthermore, we heared about Applicake, Ela Madej and Paul Klipp well before Euruko and we were sure that they will do a good job organizing Euruko in the lovely city of Krakow. And we weren’t disappointed ! Euruko 2010 went great and we met a lot of bright and fun people

A new coworker

yannski — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:30:32 +0000

While buying some stuff in a Puma store in Strasbourg, I asked brazenly if it was possible to buy those cute little pinguins they in had in the shopwindow. The shopgirl answered that, unfortunately, it was not possible to buy them. But! But, at the end of the season, in june or july, they will find new homestays for their penguins. We let our name, and voilà, 6 months later, a new coworker in the CPPlex !
A quick poll on twitter and Facebook help us find his name : welcome Pen Pen ! Thanks to @nmerouze who was the first one to suggest that name.

Obligatory geek reference.

MongoFR event in Paris

toutielicious — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:36:35 +0000

Today, with David and Yann, we were at the MongoFR event at the coworking space called La Cantine, in Paris.
Courageously, Yann registered himself as a talker to present “Ruby et MongoDB dans la pratique” and was the first speaker on the main conference room.

10gen, the company that created the MongoDB database and sponsored the MongoFR event, was well represented by some people from there who made some speaks:

Kyle Banker, talked about “Schema design“
Mathias Steam, talked about “Administration” and “Map/reduce, geospatial indexing, and other cool features” (you can see all his Mongo presentations on Github)
Alberto Lerner, talked about “Indexing and Query Optimizer”
Dwight Merriman, talked about “Replication and Replica Sets”
Eliot Horowitz, talked about “Sharding”

But there were also some French MongoDB addicts:

Mathieu Poumeyrol talked about “MongoDB for timeline storage at Fotopedia“… not exactly, he changed his talk to a feedback with MongoDB at Fotopedia
Cyril Mougel, talked about “Comment passer de MySQL á MongoDB par un cas pratique, Oupsnow“
Nicolas Clairon, talked about “Enjoy Your Development with MongoKit”
Erwan Arzur & Nicolas Fouché, talked about “MongoDB at Silentale”

Well, a great day, some high-level but interesting talks, and a lot of photos made by AF83 on Flickr and David on his Flickr too (but still no dev girls except me…)!

DroidCamp at Stuttgart

toutielicious — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 23:04:15 +0000

Today, I went to the DroidCamp with Stéphane, so I was no more the only one French there.
When we first arrived, we took our nice polo shirt and badge and a big German breakfast!

German breakfast @DroidCamp

The DroidCamp begun at 10a.m with the classical presentation of BarCamp concepts and staff members, and then the famous 3-tags people presentation.

There were 4 dedicated rooms for the sessions and I followed these ones:

session 1: “Ruboto: Ruby on Android”
- The goal is to have the possibility to easily develop Android apps using Ruby: http://ruboto.org/
session 2: “native ‘enhanced’ vs. web apps”
special session: “Blinkendroid world record”
- 51 Android devices playing an animation (useless but funny!):
session 3: “Windows phone 7 #shocked?”
- If you’re interested and you speak German, you can see the slides on slideshare: windows-phone-7-talk
session 4: “Android for business”

As we were very tired after this day, we didn’t follow the last session…

I just want to say THANK YOU again to the organization team, and especially to Benny, Moritz and Markus. See you at the next DroidCamp!

Beginners workshop at DroidCamp

toutielicious — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:54:44 +0000

Today, well this afternoon, I was attending the first part of the AndroidCamp which took place in Stuttgart: The beginners workshop.
The goal was to show to people how to develop Android apps using Eclipse, Android SDK and ADT plugin for Eclipse (in other words, a newbie session).

Benny, Moritz and Sven had the hard task to present to more than 30 persons how to build an Android app, and in english because of me (I don’t speak German). As almost everybody wasn’t used to develop with Eclipse, they shown us very slowly each steps to create an Android Project, an Android virtual device based on whatever Android SDK version and run your project.
So, we built a very basic “Hello World” app to see how this is structured and how it works.

Thanks to this beginners workshop, I had a great introduction to Android development despite of the fact that I was using Java and its ugly syntax.

What’s next?

tomorrow I’ll attend the AndroidCamp second part.
make my own Android app, maybe I’ll code it tomorrow, called BonjourMonsieur to have an eye breaking every morning on my Desire!

Back from Euruko 2010 !

toutielicious — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:11:45 +0000

Euruko 2010 afterparty, originally uploaded by novelysfrance.

We’re back from Euruko 2010 and we’re very pleased to have sponsored this conference !

We went to Krakow with Yann to attend the event. And thanks to Paul Klipp, Ela Madej and the rest of the organizing crew, Euruko 2010 was a bliss. The conference room was fully packed with Rubyist and good technical talks. Beside, you will find good overview of the 2 days conference here and here.

Bonus1 : Krakow is really a lovely city.

Bonus2: we even had a chance to take a photo with Matz, the creator of the Ruby language !