Category Archives: australia

RailsRumble – StillAlive.com – website monitoring with cucumber syntax

I haven’t blogged for a while, I’ve been writing some notes in Facebook instead and I’ll move some of that back onto my blog later.
I’ve been doing alot of things this year as I always get myself into. Just last weekend I did this 48hrs RailsRumble with 3 other guys in Sydney. We’ve done pretty well considering it’s the first time we worked together, and pretty much just came together on forming a team for the rumble.

This was actually our first idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to use your cucumber test on your live site? Most site monitoring services out there only supports ping or at best some simple text find verification. How do you know your api is authenticating? How can you make sure your search engine daemon is still serving up results while you’re asleep. Ping cannot guarantee the integrity of your website anymore. So we have a solution, our entry – StillAlive, is a new way of monitoring your website. When “Status 200” is not OK, StillAlive lets you use simple English language (cucumber’s gherkin syntax) to interact with your webapps in order to make sure every feature of the site is working.

You can do things like:

When I go to http://tellthemwhen.com/
And I follow “Make a Time!”
Then I should see “Create Notification”
When I fill in “Time” with “Tomorrow”
And I fill in “Title” with “Test Notification”
And I fill in “Message” with “This is the message in the notification”
And I press “Create Notification”
Then I should see “Test Notification”
And I should see “This is the message in the notification”

We’ve gotten pretty good feedbacks so far from users and expert judges. We’ve already made plans to take this forward and make this into an awesome product. Let us know if you’ve anyway suggestions.

There’s only a few Other teams from Australia, they produced pretty cool stuff too.

HereTil by http://railsrumble.com/teams/rocket26
Desks Near Me by
http://railsrumble.com/teams/the-rad-warlike-annex

RedCity by http://railsrumble.com/teams/red-city-crew

There’s also two teams from Hong Kong which I thought did pretty well.

http://kookiebox.r10.railsrumble.com

http://newsprank.r10.railsrumble.com

You can soon vote for us here: Team- The Wizard of Oz

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Ankoder @ Web Direction South

Just a quick post about our successful exhibition at Web Direction South 09. It was great to hear the responses and indication of interests from the developers that were attending. I had a good time standing for 12 hours 2 days in a row, not something familiar to a developer 😉

Thanks to Atlassian‘s active for support in the Aussie startup space, I was lucky to be able to have a booth there at an affordable price.

Rex Chung @ Web direction South

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I also met a bunch of cool indie startup guys as well. Very useful sharing our experiences and stories.

* Agile Bench a project management tool designed to support agile software development processes
* Ankoder a video transcoding web service built on top of Amazon’s S3 and Elastic Cloud
* Doculicious, an easy way to create embeddable web forms that generate PDF documents
* Hiive Systems web-based service & client tracking tool that provides professionals with access to critical client information
* Platform 46 Social Business Integrator
* Topikality topikality learns what sort of articles you like, and emails them to you
* 88 Miles making time tracking simple and quick

So many events on November 15 weekend.

Nov 15, seems to be a popular date for conferences. I will probably be going to “The Big Question” in Taiwan Taipei. Since we’re building a social network site for them. It’ll be good to see how much Taiwan has changed since the last time was there as a kid in 1988. Since the election of President Ma, the China-Taiwan relationship has gotten closer and more open. There’s certainly alot of potential between the two but its also a threat to Hong Kong as a middleman. I hope to find some insight for myself.

The Big Question

These are the other event’s going on at the same time:
– HK Ruby on Rails users meetup
– HK Startup Association
– Rails Camp Australia in Adelaide.
– Barcamp Sydney

Startup Camp Sydney

I’m happy to see TechNation keeping up its regular posts on Austrlian tech startups. An Australian specific tech blog is long overdue before TechCrunch‘s Arrington became a star. Something caught my eye the other day, it’s another Australian’s first – startupcamp. Railscamp has had 3 successes already and barcamp also has 3, since 07.

I would love to do it, but I have my wedding coming up and if anyone has gone through one, it’s rather stressful..
Especially when I’m doing a startup at the same time.. There’s always a next time for these things, but not for a wedding. So I’ll have to skip this one. Kudos to Bart Jellema as well, for setting up startup-australia.org, it’s got a good list of Australia startups on there. It’s really gathering steam now.

Here’s the details I quote:

1. The first StartupCamp Australia will be in Sydney only and will be a small event (numbers are limited so make sure you sign up early)
2. The date has been changed to the 5th-7th September because…
3. Geekdom has kindly made their boardroom available on those days.