I am excited to introduce Voodoo’s latest project, Hu.la, a URL shortener.  If you’re reading this post, you probably got here via a tweet or Facebook post via a short link.  While largely a commodity now, we decided to get in on the action too.  We secured this domain name earlier this year, and decided to launch our own URL shortner.  We’ve been using it internally for a couple months and now are rolling it out publicly so you can too.

One of the fun things about having the great engineering talent at Flatsourcing is being able to pursue projects like this, and occasionally they require a few hacks.  So, we want to share the story of how we built Hu.la:

• bit.ly is the leader in the URL shortner space and we applied to and were accepted in the beta of their bitly.pro program.
• The bitly.pro service powers New York Times, Amazon and TechCrunch’s own URL shorterns too.  You can sign up here.
• In order to get a homepage that allows others to access the service, we took a lesson from the guys who created 511cc.org using bitly.pro.
• And voila: we’ve launched Hu.la - take your links for a spin today.

Any questions or suggestions, please let us know.  We’d love your feedback and for you to make it your default URL shortening service.

In our most recent newsletter, we mentioned our new internal commitment to improving our business by following our “3 things per week”  mantra. Everyone in business is, or should be, concerned with how they can optimize and improve their own business. We pay consultants and efficiency experts big bucks to tell us what we should be doing, when in fact we already know better than anyone else what steps we can take to save ourselves time and money.

“3 things per week” is a commitment we made to ourselves that each week, we will individually do 3 things that improve some aspect of our business. They don’t have to be something big, in fact they should be small, easily implemented changes that save you time in the long run. Each bit of time we can save is more time we have to focus on what’s important, our clients and the projects we are passionate about.

In essence, the idea of “3 things” is simply an extension of our practice of the Agile Methodology and the core element of iterative cycles of improvement. By focusing on small, easily implemented changes we can improve our business and build momentum towards larger goals because there is a sense of achievement in each small victory.

For arguments sake, let’s assume that, on average, each small thing I work to improve saves me 10 minutes a week. From there I save 30 minutes per week, 2 hours per month, and 24 hours per year. This adds up to value both in actual dollars and reclaiming lost opportunity cost.

We’ll continue to provide updates as we implement more of these improvements, but in the meantime we’d love to hear from you about how you work to improve your business.

The answer here is definitely both for the stuff that is being done in sprints already especially. Larger team is needed for it to keep same velocity, however both technics are definitely something we’ve adopted. This is what’s needed to spend time on vs. rough estimates for longer than month periods.

It helps delivering each sprint cycle shippable product with 20% percent of system that people always use, not sometimes use, etc. So at the end of release (e.g. month with 4 sprints of a week) it’s 4 perfectly working user stories that are top priority vs. 10 features that may work and be used in future.

Hey Everyone!

We use FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/flatsoft for collecting some usefull  links around Ruby/Rails and other IT news.

Will try to make weekly reviews of them.

Web applications exploits and defenses from Goole

You will get application with full of exploits and nice list what are XSS, DoS and how to defense from them.

Howto monitor your linux server with netstat

• netstat -lnp - who and on which port
• netstat -ant - active connections and states
• netstat -ant | grep 80 | wc -l - open connections on 80 port (http)

Why, when and how write Open source, should motivate you )

Raiscast: Introducing Devise
New awesome auth rails gem, could replace authlogic.

Ruby Packaging Standard, 0.5-draft
Good example how to write Ruby libs/gems, naming standards, directory hierarchy and other. For example FooBar or Foo::Bar?

Hopping in the cloud
Very good article from Robots with their experience how the develop HopToad application.  They use Redis for delayed jobs (look like and we can use it production). BTW, guys from Github develop new nice solution using Redis http://github.com/blog/542-introducing-resque

Unobtrusive JavaScript
Article from Ryan Bates how to use JS observers instead of inline calls in the element.

Thanks,
Timur