Iterative Designs - Home

Concurrency or How I Learned to Love the 'Stache

2008-08-29T15:37:00Z

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Concurrency or "How I learned to love the 'stache" from Chris Williams on Vimeo.</center>

We are always looking for ways to improve our knowledge base as well as make new friends and help them see different lights (maybe not better lights, but different). A big part of this is reaching an increasingly larger group of people and trying to convey the morsels of information goodness we have found along the way. Our current push as you may know from chatting with us, is the exposure of Erlang and how the lessons within the language are valuable for all languages. We could (and sometimes do) wax poetically about the values of non-shared state and data and how concurrency will change the world, but we decided to present it to the people in a seminar style.

We devised a talk with the following sales pitch,

"An indepth technical discussion about concurrency and why it matters in modern web and general programming environments. With the upcoming Ruby 1.9 release and Rails 2.2/3.0 with thread safety, concurrency should be on the mind of every Ruby programmer. This talk will go into a discussion of what the different types of threads are, what precautions or advice you should carry with you as you write concurrent code, and why you should be looking into other fundamentally different languages (like erlang or scala) for long running, complex, and multi faceted requests. Topics will include Fuzed and why it represents an exciting shift in hosting options and a telnet chat client, which will be used as a backchannel during the demonstration. The goal is not to scary you, but to help you see the forest despite the concurrent trees."

We are presenting this talk at the local area user groups, NOVARUG and DCRUG, as well as the NOVA Languages group. Each time we do this presentation it grows, expands, and becomes more kick ass based on audience feedback. I unfortunately forgot to record NOVARUG's presentation, but will record the DCRUG one and post it to our blog when it is ready. Until then, we have provided our first cut of the presentation here for your viewing and listening pleasure (and as part of our world dominance plan for functional programming!!!). We want to try to evangelize the benefits of at least looking at different languages and understanding why they are different. If you are interested in having us present to you, your local user group, or your company, send us an email at

The slides for this presentation are also available in their most current form for your entertainment!

Ruby DCamp 2008

2008-08-14T22:27:00Z

Ruby DCamp 2008

From their site, "If you're experienced with Ruby then you know what you like about the language. But even more importantly you know what needs work! Here's your big chance! Gather with other experienced Rubyists, discuss what's broken, decide how to fix it, and then start down that path together."

We are quite excited about this event because we feel that it will bring some of the "weird" that we absolutely loved at RubyFringe to the DC area. We are sponsoring the event at the double secret gold status, which I think means that we are on the roll to go for Micheal Phelps 8 Gold Sponsorship next year -- or is that in four years. If you are in the area, definitely join us at this event, we are working very hard with Evan Light to ensure that the event is stellar and you might even learn something (can't promise it though).

Entra Health Systems

2008-08-14T17:16:00Z

Entra Health Systems seeks to improve healthcare management through the application of technology. They provide a variety of services within the healthcare industry including patient services automation and chronic disease management. Entra Health Systems also has a Intellectual Property Marketing solutions branch that bridges the gap between inventor and the healthcare market. Iterative Designs has had the pleasure to work very intimately with Entra Health Sysetms on a wide spectrum of projects.

Entra Health Systems (EHS) seeks to improve healthcare management through the application of technology. They provide a variety of services within the healthcare industry including patient services automation and chronic disease management. EHS also has a Intellectual Property Marketing solutions branch that bridges the gap between inventor and the healthcare market. Iterative Designs has had the pleasure to work very intimately with EHS on a wide spectrum of projects.

Entra Health Systems was seeking a new, revitalized web presence to express their premier healthcare technology and intellectual property marketing efforts. We worked with them to identify the visual presence and concept that they were seeking and overlaid that design onto an established content management system. This empowers EHS to add, update, and remove content without a middle man, making their web publication process very fluid, natural, and efficient.

Services Provided:

Information Technology Subject Matter Expertise for Intellectual Property Marketing and Commercialization
Sales Assistance for Intellectual Property
Website Design
Content Management System Theme
Hosting Setup and Configuration
Subversion SCM setup and configuration

Announcing the great erlang:out event

2008-08-12T03:27:00Z

The Northern Virginia Languages Group will be holding as its culmination of the Erlang Language the Great erlang:out Event. It will be a 9AM-6PM Hackfest (maybe longer) of Erlang project development. The project has not yet been decided and we will be learning as much as we can between now and the event date (tentatively September 20th, 2008) in preparation of building the next killer app for Erlang, assuming CouchDB, Facebook chat, and ejabberd are the existing killer apps. Stay tuned to join us and we might be looking for beer/pizza/etc sponsorships. This event will by no means be centralized (like Erlang itself) we will be doing remote commits and changes - more details to come either on the NoVA Languages Group Google Group (link above) and the Iterative Designs blog, which you are reading right now.

You Made Two Hours Happy

2008-08-09T05:14:00Z

We want to thank all of the people who attended the RubyNation Happy Hour. We had a great time and hope you did as well. With the tremendous support of Blue Box Group and Hotel Sierra, we were able to pull of a great couple of happy hours. Special thanks go out to Ken Henderson for all of his help and effort to arrange the day of festivities. We have made a rubynationhappyhour tag on flickr, so if you have more pictures of the event please post them with that tag! Thanks!

Why limit happy to just an hour?

2008-07-24T15:41:00Z

As you may know we have a bit of the taste for great craft brews and a desire to support and if possible inspire communities of social tech. We previously announced that we are sponsoring the RubyNation conference in Herndon, VA, but we decided to go even a bit further. We are co-sponsoring with Blue Box Group the conference happy hour. The event will be the night of Friday, August 1, 2008 from 6pm - 8pm at Hotel Sierra in Dulles Virginia. We are opening the invitation up to anyone who would like to come, but please if you are planning on joining but not able to make it to the conference, can you send us an email to let us know. We would appreciate the heads up so we can make sure the hotel does not flip out. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Fringed Out

2008-07-22T02:00:00Z

I just got back from RubyFringe and it was without question the greatest conference I have ever had the pleasure of attending. I am sure you have seen the postings through the Internet, so I will try to not repeat the wild applause for the event. This is how I have always hoped conference would be and were always seriously let down. The entire weekend was an incredible blast of energy, excitement, and meticulously crafted perfection. My hat is off to unspace and the fringe community - I am honored and proud to be a member. I learned a lot about merb and other technologies that I have seriously wanted to just dig into, but never could find the time. I met a lot of awesome people, with awesome stories, and very cool projects. I think I started like 5 applications at this conference, hopefully I will finish one of them -- some day.

If they do this again and I very much hope they do, I will definitely be getting the tickets the day its announced, its the only conference I have been too that I came back feeling refreshed despite very little (read in no) sleep. The Ruby community and programming world in general is a much, much better place thanks to RubyFringe.

RubyNation 2008

2008-07-04T17:22:00Z

RubyNation 2008

From their site, "RubyNation is an annual Ruby conference serving the Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC areas. This year's RubyNation will happen on August 1 and 2, 2008 in Herndon, VA."

This conference is seriously right in our backyard (and down the Toll Road), and we believe it is a great thing for the blossoming Ruby community in the Washington DC metro area. We have signed on as a sponsor of the event and hope to see you at the event.

ALSO we will be hosting a party for the conference, more details to arrive closer to the date. Be on the look out because we will be bringing our standard beer geekery to a new level with this event. Hope to see you there!

Pragmatic Studios

2008-04-20T22:46:00Z

Pragmatic Studios - Advanced Rails Studio 2008

From their site, "the Advanced Rails Studio is an interactive workshop that takes your Rails knowledge to the next level. Mastery is the key to building killer Rails applications with confidence and efficiency. By learning how others have solved tough problems, and applying those lessons in context, you'll save time while building better Rails applications."

We participated in the Advanced Rails Studio from April 16 - 20, 2008 in our hometown of Reston, VA.

Craig Coyne

2007-09-06T13:16:00Z

Craig Coyne was in the midst of a massive brand re-design to attract a wider audience, both young and old, for their jewelry sales. Craig Coyne utilized Iterative Designs for the entire the web effort of this brand roll-out during the Fall of 2006 and we were able to deliver the new site with e-commerce capability by in time for the holiday rush and the brand announcement.

The Craig Coyne site is built with Ruby on Rails, xHTML, and CSS. It makes extensive use of the Script.aculo.us effects and animation library to provide a rich interface experience without bandwidth or plug-in requirements. As part of this project, we integrated an e-commerce store for Craig Coyne and a weblog system for Sam, Jesse, and Michael to publish content for their site visitors.

Services Provided:

Custom Ruby on Rails Website Creation
Web Hosting Setup and Configuration
Virtual Private Network Setup and Configuration
Information Technology Infrastructure Configuration and Maintenance
E-Commerce Website for Online Sale of Jewelry
Corporate Email Accounts Setup
Electronic Mailer Integration
Rich Interface Creation with Javascript only