Our very own Emil Marceta gave a presentation on Sunday, which is now available online:
If you are having troubles viewing the slideshow, please visit the Slideshare website.
One of E-xact’s developers, Matthew Carriere, particularly enjoyed EngineYard’s presentation, “Reading about how you could be doing things is theory, having Ezra and the EngineYard crew tell you how you SHOULD be doing things was doctrine.” Matthew also noted, “Another highlight was the keynote by Joel Spolsky who gave an engaging talk about design and culture.”
Our theme of “Payments on Rails” featured our Realtime Payment Manager application and its journey over the years from .NET technology to its path onto Rails.
Our payment processing and transaction management has been going full steam ahead since its launch last year and we feel we truly prove Rails for enterprise. Being able to share this story with all those at RailsConf was a real treat and we enjoyed the questions and comments from all those who visited our booth.
We’re on site right now in the exhibit hall so have a look around and stop by our booth to chat, view a demo, talk shop, and scoop up a USB thumbdrive. Who doesn’t love swag? We look forward to our time at RailsConf and will be reporting back throughout the weekend, leading up to our speaker Emil Marceta’s talk on Sunday afternoon.
E-xact Transactions’ own Emil Marceta will be speaking about our unique ‘Payments on Rails‘ technology.
From the blogs:
E-xact will have coverage of the event over the next few weeks and our developers will be on hand at our booth. Feel free to stop by anytime during RailsConf for a demo, to ask questions, and to find out more about our payment gateway, powered by Rails.
The future of web technology, including standards and XML, with reference to the wide range of technologies encompassed in Open Source.
Tim began his talk by asking how many in the crowd were developers, designers, managers, or communicators. He followed up by taking another survey of which frameworks attendees are using for their projects - PHP and .NET seemed to rule the room.
“Contributors to the web” are various people with ranging knowledge of the internet and technologies that make up the most every day of applications. He then went on to describe various languages such as PHP (an example of a PHP application would be WordPress, which is the platform for this website and blog) and then spoke about Rails.
Tim’s feature of Rails was a sheer love-fest, which was really great seeing as how it’s the foundation of E-xact’s Realtime Payment Manager. Two assertions in Rails are DRY (dont repeat yourself) and COC (convention over configuration). He also proclaimed Rails as “a good choice for your next project,” and that reading a Rails book will have a very positive influence on the way you design things for the web. Tim believe that Rails is picking up steam for several reasons including the fact that unit testing hard to avoid, it has incredibly compact code, it’s clean, object-oriented, and well-designed.
Moving on from frameworks, the keynote addressed social media tools like blogs and Twitter are part of the new culture of contribution which is good for business as it encourages the flow of information and communication. Here are Tim’s words of advice:
Whether it’s with your website, blog, clients, customers, employees and your team at work, create a conversation. There will be more to come from Open Web Vancouver over the next two days.
Read the other blog posts in this series: First Keynote at Open Web Vancouver…
Attendees were treated to two keynotes, the first from Zak Greant and the second by Tim Bray.
First Keynote:
Zak Greant - The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Open Source
Free Software and Open Source are understood to be reshaping technology. What is less understood is how critical FOSS is to the future of free societies. During this session, we’ll examine the past, present and future of our freedoms, stopping along the way to visit ancient god-kings, hacker heretics, long-dead muftis and our first computers.
Zak took a look at “free” software, that’s “free” as in freedom. He went through a comprehensive history of language technology through the ages how it aided society, science, changed business.
Speech, communications, and technology become fluent for the masses through simple activities - being calculations that need to be solved. Starting as early in our civilizations as rudimentary symbols or stones which were precursors to modern accounting practices.
Zak asserted that “Language is the Great Tool”, in the way that folks use code to create applications and to communicate in all aspects of society. Another point of focus was free speech. Zak reached all the way back to the days of the Stationers Company Monopoly and how it relates and translates to today’s proprietary software companies. Having one group of individuals control production and supply and demand was strangles an industry and progress.
Continuing on through the ages we were given a look at technologies that were expensive to begin with (telegraph, telephone) progressing to revolutionary innovations like the phonograph and the radio. The first era of this history dealt with developing/inventing the language then improving on it. The “vision” is what comes next.
There was a quick show of hands for those that used to use a Commodore 64.
What I got out of Zak’s talk was that everything has a start, an invention and an innovation. It’s what we do with these technologies and how we make them available to the masses that solidifies them in history as another great stepping stone.
Open Web Vancouver is taking place today and tomorrow at the Vancouver Exhibition and Convention Centre, check the upcoming schedule for times and session information.
Several E-xact representatives will be attending this year’s Open Web Vancouver, April 14-15 at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The Open Web is a movement by organizations and individuals for “open standards, open source, and a web whose major content formats are not controlled by a single vendor” (Brendan Eich)
An Open Web Technology is any technology based on open standards and open source software that is used for web development, including (but not limited to) Linux, MySQL, PHP, Rails, Drupal, jQuery and Firefox.
I hope to report back throughout the day about what our delegates have experienced in terms of sessions and talks, as it should be well worth sharing. Registration is still open for the two-day event that kicks off April 14th @ 9:45am - watch for our liveblogging coverage!
