Darjeelink - Alexis Perrier

Antoine de Saint Exupery and the KISS Principle

I just found this amazing quote by Antoine de Saint Exupery that sums up the essence of the KISS principle, “Keep It Simple Stupid”. The Kiss principle is at the root of successful and easy to use gizmos, gadgets and web applications such as the Flip Video or Twitter.
The Keep it Simple approach is also what drives the design of the Qameha application, we have been working on. The idea being to enable any user simply to start using the application right away, without any training, just by figuring out himself or herself how to do things. In just the same way people use Twitter or Facebook spontaneously.

Anyway here is the Quote :

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away

In French, the quote drops the reference to the designer :

Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher

Enough said !

Tags: Antoine de St Exupery, Kiss, Qameha, web design

Posted in Qameha, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Ruby, csv and excell files

Classic problem, you need to generate some kind of backup file for your data in your application.
Knowing Excell is as closed a format as the vaults of the CIA unless you sell your soul, you run for csv.

You find the gem Faster CSV, generate your data, export, …. and open the generated .csv file with your copy of Excell
and of course it does not work (what else can you expect from the big M ?)
All the accented caraters are transformed into gibberish.
So you google around and learn that to generate an Excell compatible csv file you have to lose a few more hours of work to Microsoft, but somehow you knew that already, (IE6 anyone ?)
Great explanation on the Plataforma blog
Exporting data to CSV and Excel in your Rails apps

Simply put :

So, these are the three rules for dealing with Excel-friendly-CSV:
1. Use tabulations, not commas.
2. Fields must NOT contain newlines.
3. Use UTF-16 Little Endian to send the file to the user. And include a Little Endian BOM manually.

However your troubles are over. The gem to rule them all exists, it is named “Spreadsheet”
Spreadsheet ruby gem

You might want to check out also
csv builder
and of course for all that to work you need the iConv gem
Iconv

Tags: csv, csv builder, excell, fastercsv, iconv, ruby, spreadsheet, xls

Posted in ruby | No Comments »

Qameha : un nouvel acteur du e-recrutement

Le site de News Ressources humaines “My RH line” vient de publier une interview de Léonard Briot de la Crochais, Directeur de la stratégie et des partenariats de Qameha.
Qameha est une application web de gestion du recrutement, des évaluations et de la mobilité interne que nous avons conçu et réalisé depuis maintenant un peu plus d’un an et qui est proche de son lancement officiel, début janvier.
Extrait :

My RH Line : Qu’apporte votre outil par rapport à ceux existant sur le marché ?

Léonard Briot de la Crochais : Il apporte de la simplicité. Une des grandes particularités de l’outil est de concevoir le recrutement comme un projet avec un pilote qui est responsable de la bonne fin du projet.
[...] Ce qui est assez symptomatique chez nos concurrents, c’est qu’ils facturent à l’utilisateur, nous non. Nous considérons que tout cadre doit pouvoir être acteur d’un processus de recrutement.
[...] Le recruteur sait quand il y a un problème et sait ce qu’il faut faire pour le résoudre. En effet, quand il n’y a pas le bon chainage d’actions ou de délais, il y a des alertes qui vont prévenir le pilote du recrutement .

L’interview complete sur http://www.myrhline.com
Un nouvel acteur du e-recrutement : Qameha

Tags: évaluations, interview, Léonard Briot de la Crochais, Qameha, recrutement

Posted in Qameha | No Comments »

Why I just love Ruby on Rails

After 9 years of php programming and a single year of ruby on rails, there simply is no turning back.
Ruby on Rails rocks !

It’s easy to do great stuffs
Implementing fancy web 2.0 functions and behaviours is easy as 1, 2, 3. Read the library, get the plugin from github , watch the railscast and you’re set and ready to go. Whether it’s related to the user interface or the back end of your web application, you have super powers.

Fast learning experience
Doing a simple Ajax query on the server I needed to update several elements on my page. Here comes RJS and a straightforward implementation. Couple of hours later the page is
Reordering list items, just follow the screencast, add a couple of lines to your code and you are set.
You want to leave the dark side and become a jedy master by testing you app, here comes cucumber and webrat. A day or two and you’re doing all the tdd you need to.

Small code
Keeping your code small is not only a must it’s very enjoyable. Each time I refactor my code, I am struck how concise it can become. And small code means few bugs.

Bugs begone
With ruby on rails, the client does not call you every week saying they don’t really understand what’s going on or why the web app is behaving like it does.

Tags: Ruby on rails

Posted in Ruby on rails | No Comments »

What’s up ?

Long time since I’ve blogged. Feels like blogging is already a thing of the past and anyway who’s got the time to write something decent and worthwhile.
Everybody’s tweeting their life away.
I myself am more and more worried about privacy and about leaving traces or personal opinions that may come to hunt me down years from now. If my Internet activities are public, which of course they are, I can only write about neutral things that may not indispose future clients or partners.
That does not leave much to blog about.

Anyway who’s got time ?

So right now I’m off to Scotland for Scotland on Rails.
Over the past year I have totally fallen in love with Ruby and its Rails icing. I am now working on a Saas project in the recruitment sector. It’s called Qameha. Great time to create a start up or is it ?
RoR makes it really enjoyable to build such applications. I feel like an engineer again, conceiving, building things and not like an ant trying to move mountains grain dust by grain dust by debugging php applications.

The Scotland on Rails conference promises to be very interesting with good speakers and subjects that will extend my grasp of the Ruby Ecosystem. I love this word “ecosystem”.

Besides the Qameha project, there are at least two other projects that I’m considering worth working on.
I’d like to partner with someone with a more commercial background and experience.
So if you know how to make a buck on the Internet and are looking for a geek partner, drop me an email.

Cheers
Alexis

Tags: Rails, sor09

Posted in Conference | 2 Comments »