Design and Big Ideas

WisdomGroup is hiring a web design intern. Our current volume of work requires it. The ideal candidate will share our beliefs about design, summarized as…

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. ~Steve Jobs

Great design is functional and inspiring. Autodesk captures the idea in this ad from several years ago:

Ruby on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer roughly the size of a deck of cards. It’s equipped with an ARM processor that runs Linux. USB ports let you attach a keyboard and mouse. Video is supported via HDMI and RCA. Storage is handled by SD cards. There’s an Ethernet port.

You can buy a Raspberry Pi for $35.00.

Will it Run Ruby?

When my Raspberry Pi arrived, I was curious: Will it run Ruby? How about Rails? This article describes my experience with RVM, Ruby, and Rails on a Raspberry Pi, along with the “gotchas” I encountered along the way.

Long Tail Opportunities

You are already familiar with the 80/20 rule. In the late 1800s an Italian economist discovered that 80% of the wealth in his country was owned by 20% of the people. More recently we find that the 80/20 rule applies in other areas of our lives. Professional service firms find that eighty percent of the revenue comes from twenty percent of the clients. Merchants find that eighty percent of sales comes from twenty percent of the products. Winners at the very top of any field tend to win by a large margin.

Make Your Competition Irrelevant

Path to Victory

A skillfully executed business strategy is one path to victory. Many strategy books will tell business owners how to win at the expense of the competition, how to take market share away from the competition, and so on.

The book Blue Ocean Strategy proposes a non-typical path to victory over the competition. According to the authors, following a blue ocean strategy will make your competition irrelevant.

Building iOS Apps With RubyMotion

Special thanks to the organizers of MagicRuby and Aloha Ruby for inviting me to present RubyMotion at their respective conferences. Confreaks recorded video at the Aloha Ruby event.

The fizzbuzz sample code can be found on GitHub. Slides are on SpeakerDeck.

Should you use RubyMotion or Objective-C for iOS development? That depends…