Don’t forget: Shopify’s second pub night is tonight! Come hang out with the Shopifolks, whether your interests are in tech, creative, “bidniss” or just good conversation, food and drink. We’ll be at Peter Devine’s (in ByWard Market — 73 Clarence Street, at William) from 5:30 until about 9:30 or so. Join us!
This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.
The folks at Heroku have put out a press release (okay, PR people, I’ll call it a news release. Happy now?) as well as a blog post announcing that Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto has joined them. A quick recap for those of you unfamiliar with those names:
Here’s the picture from the blog entry with the announcement. I hope it becomes Matz’s business card!
What does this all mean in the end? Think of it as an artist/patron kind of relationship. Open source software has had a number of notable relationships of this sort:
In all these cases, it was an organization with a fair bit of money hiring a developer who built the OS or language they use. The organization benefits from continued development of that open source OS or language, and the programmer benefits from a steady paycheck. Luckily, we also benefit!
According to the Heroku blog, Matz and “a small team of Ruby’s core committers” will continue to work on the Ruby programming language. They close their entry with this:
We love Ruby, and we are honored to be able to give back to the community and to Matz, the Ruby dai-sensei, by providing resources for him and his team to continue to design and architect the language.
Sounds good to me. Time for a celebratory dance:
The Shopify Platform does a lot on its own. However, there are cases where a shopowner is going to want some kind of functionality that the baseline platform can’t deliver. That’s okay, because we’ve got apps!
Shopify provides an API that allows you to programmatically perform almost any task that a Shopify shopowner can perform using the admin panel for a shop. This lets you write Shopify apps which shopowners can use to extend the capabilities of their Shopify stores. Some apps make life easier for customers, some help shopowners run their stores, some do both at the same time.
Shopify also provides the App Store, a marketplace where app developers can put their apps up for sale to the 16,000 or so Shopify shopowners in our ecosystem. It puts your apps in a place that’s easy to find and browse, right where potential customers can easily see (and hopefully buy) them.
And finally, Shopify has an App Wishlist. This list is going to be a web application someday, but in the meantime, it’s a page on our wiki that lists the apps that have been requested by both users and Shopify. I wrote about it earlier, and since then, the list has been updated — it now has been broken into three categories:
I’ll be going through this list regularly, polishing up the entries in the list.
If you’re interested in building apps for Shopify, check out the App Wishlist on the Shopify Wiki, then hit the Shopify App Development page to get started!
The next stop on the BarCamp Tour is New Orleans for BarCamp NOLA, which takes place this weekend! And it’s not me going solo — I’m being joined by my coworker Edward Ocampo-Gooding, where we’ll participate in both the main BarCamp on Saturday and the Hack Day on Sunday.
Some quick info about BarCamp NOLA:
BarCamp is an unconference. The idea behind unconferences is to turn the concept of a conference upside-down. You still have sessions at an unconference, but rather than being planned by the organizers, they’re created by the attendees. At the start of BarCamp, any attendee with an idea for a session can propose one and get it on the schedule grid, which gives that session a time slot and a room in which to hold it. Some people have sessions ready, others extemporize them on the spot, but in either case, sessions are meant to be more like dialogues rather than lectures. At BarCamp, there are no spectators, only participants!
BarCamp Tour is an “unsponsorship”. It’s made up of a number of startups: BatchBlue, Grasshopper Group, MailChimp, Shopify and Wufoo. While we do one traditional sponsor thing — namely, providing money to help BarCamps — we go beyond traditional sponsorship. If a BarCamp needs a session and no one’s proposing one, we’ll do one. We’ve done all sorts of sessions on all sorts of topics, from HTML5 and CSS to escaping from the corporate world to running your startup like Genghis Khan. We also help put together the after-party. We also help the organizers out any way we can, even if it’s just moving chairs and cleaning up.
On Sunday, they’re holding a Hack Day. Here’s how the BarCamp NOLA folks describe it:
The New Orleans twist on BarCamp is our second day “Hack Day.” With all the diversified talent in one room, let’s giving something back to the community! Developers, designers, educators, content writers, and videographers collaborate to build and launch a project in a single day.
I’m looking forward to this one. Watch this blog for reports from BarCamp NOLA!
This is yesterday’s Penny Arcade comic, inspired by the fact that Mike “Gabe” Krahulik is currently using a Windows Phone. There’s a lot of good things about WP7, from its pared-down, content-first, glance-and-go user interface to the fact that it still provides the best developer experience in my book. If you’ve ever seen my “Zero to Fart App in 60 seconds” demo, you’ll know what I mean.
I myself have been using an iPhone for a while, but will bounce and forth between phones once I figure out why my Windows Phone — part of my fabulous parting gifts from Microsoft — isn’t working.
Want to make better slide presentations? Yes, you do, and this slide deck — How to Make Awesome Diagrams for Your Slides, by Enrique Garcia Cota — on how to make the most out of the diagrams you include in them.
This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.
It’s short notice, but I’m declaring it anyway: Shopify is holding another pub night this Wednesday in Ottawa’s ByWard market at Peter Devine’s. Here’s the quick info:
A scene from the last Shopify Pub Night, featuring some Shopifolks: Cody, Clara and Liz.
This is an informal gathering for techies, creatives and businesspeople of all stripes to get together, meet the Shopifolks and talk about programming, ecommerce, startups, design, beer, the weather, music…whatever! It’s about enjoying the summer, catching up with friends and getting to know the local community. And food. And beer. Perhaps a lot of beer.
We’re putting out a special invitation for Ottawa’s local security gurus — this gathering will also be a local security meetup! Hence the photo above, from Hackers. I was willing to suspend disbelief on a lot of things in this movie, from Penn Gilette and Angelina Jolie being infosec experts to "The Gibson", but trying to portray rollerblades as cool? That was just too much.