Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
And while I love all Portland and Silicon Forest projects equally, those first couple of projects I covered will always hold a special place in my heart. So today’s news that Rails Boxcar was headed north to Tacoma got my attention.
Roughly two years ago—along about the time I launched Silicon Florist—Portland-based Planet Argon was launching a project of their own: a hosting service for Ruby on Rails apps called Rails Boxcar.
And while I love all Portland and Silicon Forest projects equally, those first couple of projects I covered will always hold a special place in my heart. So today’s news that Rails Boxcar was headed north to Tacoma got my attention. Read More
Today, I had the privilege of sitting in on an Open Source meeting of the minds at OTBC, where a sizable contingent of folks from the Open Source community in Japan—programmers, entrepreneurs, professors, reporters—shared their vision for establishing a Mecca for Ruby enthusiasts—and a hub for Open Source—in Japan.
The bulk of the Japan team heralds from Matsue, a town on the north end of the main island in Japan. They are in the midst of developing the “Ruby City MATSUE Project,” a concentrated effort to make Matsue the “Mecca of Ruby.” The OSS Society Shimane also works in conjunction with the project to promote Open Source and Ruby.
Much like the efforts around the Portland-area Open Source scene, the MATSUE project is working to foster community building around codefests and the sharing of ideas on how to apply Open Source technologies.
The community is also lucky enough to have a university that provides a full semester load of undergraduate course work on Ruby, Rails, JRuby, and applying the technologies.
Besides their dedication to and focus on this effort, the group also commands some substantial geek-cred from the participation of Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, one of the original developers of the Ruby language, who is a resident of the town.
After spending today with the OTBC and dinner with the Portland Ruby Brigade, tonight, the Matsue contingent will head down to Corvallis to visit with the Oregon State Open Source Lab.
An hour into the meeting, the two sides of the table were already pitching ideas back and forth. Sharing concepts and benefits of pursuing Open Source development.
And that’s a thing—I’d like to think—that we’d be very happy to keep going.
This is the first—of hopefully many—meetings of the minds between the Portland Open Source community and the Matsue Open Source community that, with any luck, will develop into a “sister city” arrangement to foster both of our communities’ continued learning and development.
The next time these folks are back in town, I’d highly encourage trying to meet up with them.
Whether it’s true or not, folks in Portland like to claim that we’ve got more restaurants and bars per capita than any city in the United States. And that has a lot of folks thinking about the ranking and reviewing of those restaurants and bars.
I mean, we have a ton of restaurants. But they’re not all good.
Enter tastymate, a new restaurant review tool, which has quietly launched a BETA of its service.
A Ruby-on-Rails side-project for Graeme Nelson, tastymate was designed to be simple, straightforward, and quick, with a simple premise:
I created tastymate because I wanted a better way to find and share tasty restaurants and bars. I wanted to be able to find tasty spots through my friends and their friends.
“Voting” is based on how many people have added the restaurant or bar to their personal lists of “tasty spots.”
So, it’s another restaurant-review site, you say. What’s the extra ingredient?
The little extra ingredient that makes tastymate interesting—besides its inherent simplicity—is tastymate’s Twitter integration.
Follow tastymate on Twitter and you’ll receive notifications when new folks join or when restaurants are added.
If you have Twitter on all-day, it provides a pretty compelling way to answer the “where should I go to eat?” question when you have recommendations flowing in via your Twitter stream. Especially as the user base continues to grow.
For more information or to register for an account, visit tastymate.