Paul, Jake and I were chatting a few weeks ago wondering how we can establish an ongoing dialog with our peers in product strategy and capture the innovative ideas they have for our future products. We thought of several ways to do this:
Having conference calls to exchange ideas on a regular basis
Inviting our peers to collaborate on a Google doc
Build a simple website to track their ideas
Obviously, 1 and 2 are bad ideas, so we opted for 3. What we needed was a site where people can submit their ideas, tag them, have them be rated by their peers, and allow comments to be entered. I like to call it “The Wall” — throw your ideas up on the wall and see if they stick… the community will decide. The real name of the site is “IdeaFactory”. A pretty simple site, really. It follows the same principles as most Web 2.0 sites today — folksonomies and feedback systems (ratings/comments) to facilitate community building. So, that night I set out to build it.
As you know, I’m a rails fanboy now and so building it with RoR was a no brainer for me. I already knew that there were rails plugins for most of the features we needed (tagging, comments, search, etc.) My job would be to just tie them all together. To start, I gathered together the best plugins I knew about to build this site (I used agilewebdevelopment.com to help me). I ended up with these plugins:
acts_as_commentable — for comments integration
acts_as_ldap_authenticated — this is a variation on acts_as_authenticated with LDAP authentication support. In the future, I think I’ll migrate the LDAP code in this plugin to the restful_authentication plugin. I needed this plugin to tie into Oracle’s LDAP system so that users can just use their Oracle userid/pwds to get into the site.
acts_as_taggable_on_steroids — for tagging support
asset_packager — not necessary, but does a nice job of combining and minifying my javascripts and stylesheets
minus_r — not necessary, but I hate the way rails treats javascript (they make you code your javascript in ruby… lame). Also, I wanted this since I prefer to use jQuery instead of Prototype.
permalink_fu — not necessary, but gives me nice readable URLs
acts_as_rateable — enables a five star rating system
tiny_mce — enables WYSIWYG text editing which allows people to enter their content with some basic formatting.
The beauty of using rails is that over the past few years, it’s become a popular choice for building “2.0″ style apps. And so, lots of the features of a “2.0″ style web application have been turned into rails plugins which makes building stuff with those features dirt simple. It’s also a framework that has a huge (and growing) community of developers who love to share their knowledge and code.
When I started building the IdeaFactory, I had no idea that I would have a working version within 24 hours with all the key feature (tagging, ratings, comments, and LDAP auth). I’ve built a few rails apps before this one, but none that were really that interesting. The IdeaFactory is something that was interesting because it was badly needed by our teams — too many ideas weren’t being shared and critiqued by the general Oracle ecosystem. So, we knew that if we built the IdeaFactory, it would get used a fair bit and would help Oracle product strategists be more collaborative.
I started coding on a Thursday night and by mid-day Friday morning, I had the general pieces in place so that data can be entered. On Friday afternoon, I requested a new hostname (http://ideas.us.oracle.com — intranet) which came alive by Saturday. I made a few enhancements over Saturday and Sunday and by Monday, the site was live! Since then, the site’s taken off (thanks to the additional boost by Justin). It’s become such a popular site internally, that there’s talk of putting together a public facing IdeaFactory site for Oracle customers — I’m hoping that happens.
While many of us in development have been used to the whole process of requirements gathering, writing a BRD (business requirements doc), FDD (functional design doc), and TDD (technical design doc) — which I’m intimately used to doing over the years, it’s refreshing to be able to just roll up my sleeves and start building something and have a working product within hours of starting.
I can’t wait for my next project. Stay tuned… you’ll hear about it here.
Mark Osborne on 21 Feb 12Should I Take a New Hampshire Field Sobriety Test? New Hampshire Field Sobriety Tests (FST's) Everyone has an opinion about Field Sobriety Tests ("FST's"). Police, prosecutors, and other members of the law enforcement community will likely tell you that FST's are the best way to determine if someone is impaired by drugs or alcohol, short of a breath test. You may be arrested for DUI if the police believe that you did not perform well on the field sobriety tests where you walk the line and touch your nose, then we look to see why. We inspect the surface area where you were told to do the tests. We inquire as to whether the officer properly instructed you on how to take these "tests". We inquire as to whether you have any medical conditions that would have hindered your ability to perform these roadside contortions. Most defense attorneys will tell you FST's are the biggest joke going and that their results are unscientific, unreliable, and mislead judges and juries all over the country. Where do Justin and Mark stand on this issue? Well, their answer is simple - it doesn't really matter what police and lawyers thinks about FST's. What matters is this: Does your JUDGE buy into the FST propaganda. If you are in front of a judge who is skeptical about FST's, then it may not matter how "badly" you did on them. On the other hand, if you have a judge who thinks that FST's are as reliable and precise as the Hubbell telescope, then all the fuss about their unreliability isn't going to matter either. Should I Take The Field Sobriety Test? As a rule, Mark and Justin would recommend that you not take them - period. After all, if you don't take any FST's, then you won't have to worry about what your judge thinks about them. If he doesn't have any FST's to consider during your trial, then they can't be used against you. Exercise Your Rights, You Can Simply Say No! As a rule of thumb, if the police officer stopped you for s
