Many of us join the game as spectators, but a group of web designers and programmers decided to stay together in the centre of London to participate App making marathon called Londinium MMXII Hackathon.

“Hackathon” is the combination of “Hack” + “Marathon”. "Hack" does not mean attacking the Olympics website, but means to make some "Cool Apps", such as data visualisation, geo mashup, games, and even some gadgets. Since this is called "Marathon", these technologist gather for a whole weekend, and some of them stays over the venue with sleeping bags to work on their apps in a theme of London and summer of sports.

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Olympic Medal Rivalry

Introduction

Whether you bought many game tickets or are ready to pack your clothes to fly away from chaotic London, there is one thing you can not ignore during the Olympic game period: the medal counts race among countries. The IOC states that the competition is among individuals, not countries, but that's what most people get excited or emotional about.

I analysed the past Olympic data from various angles and created a few data visualisation apps. You can play with the apps so that you can find answers to the following questions everybody is curious about:

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New Bamboo's culture is about making ourselves and our clients happy, but we just don't stop at that. Recently, I joined an initiative to teach kids how to program. During 5 weeks, I joined Yali Sassoon and helped him hosting after-school programming lessons at Burlington Danes Academy School.

Once a week, we would get some brave volunteers (that's the kids!) who would let us introducing them to the wonderful world of computer programming. I had been for some time interested in the topic, and wanted to share my love for my trade with others. This was the perfect opportunity for me.

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Introduction

In the past, I've written a few blog posts about Japanese Ruby community and its cultural and language barrier from the rest of the world. As the country that gave birth to Ruby, there are a lot of interesting resource about Ruby. Here are some of the interesting books written about Ruby in Japanese.

• The world of Code = A book written by Matz about his view on programming
• Ruby Hacker's guide (RHG) = Page by page guide to Ruby internal source code.
• Write your own esoteric language in Ruby
• Garbage Collection - Algorithms and Implementations = Detailed explanation about various garbage collection techniques, coauthored by Narihiro Nakamura, the contributor of Ruby 1.9 GC

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Can you create a working application in 15 minutes?

I believe that yes indeed you can do that. The questions are: How?
What are the downsides?.

The how is pretty much using right tools for the job. For most of my
projects it means this:

-Ruby 1.9.2
-RVM
-Ruby on rails 3.1 +
-Bundler
-Devise
-MySQL
-jQuery
-Twitter Bootstrap
-ActiveAdmin
-Airbrake
-SendGrid
-Capistrano
-Ubuntu on a remote server

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Introduction

Back in June 2010, I published a blog post detailing how to perform Ajax file uploads from your HTML forms. The result worked pretty well, but there was still some room for browser vendors to make things even simpler for us.

Turns out, they have. The specific improvement that made this possible is the FormData interface, first introduced in Safari 5, and later in Chrome 7 and Firefox 4.

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They're called sprints because they're fast.

Agile development is designed for quality and flexibility. The fact that it's also highly efficient is a bonus. There's a huge variance in developer efficiency, even among capable and motivated people, and the combination of Rails and a strong process means that we really get things done.

Sprint planning

On the surface, planning out and committing to a one-week sprint is about giving the product owner - the client - some certainty about what they'll be able to ship. But as a developer, it provides a powerful focus.

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About a month ago we had a hack day at New Bamboo, a day where all the bambinos were free to work on any kind of project they wanted to. I decided to experiment with the HTML5 Audio Data Api, and canvas.fm, (code) is the outcome of that experiment.

Canvas.fm is a small app that allows you to listen to music available on SoundCloud. Whilst the audio is playing it draws a visualisation of the current song using HTML5 canvas. It uses a server component, powered by Node.js, to convert SoundCloud's streaming MP3 audio into the OGG format - which Firefox supports.

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Note from translator:

This is a translation of an article from "PublicKey" - Enterprise IT x Cloud Computing x Web Technology / Blog.

Mr Junichi Niino kindly allowed me to translate his original article from Japanese to English.

Also, special thanks to @knowtheory for editing my translation.

Title: "I am looking forward to accelerating Ruby's progress" - Q&A with Matz regarding joining Heroku as a chief architect.

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What is the problem?

Using the location hash to keep track of current page state and enable back button navigation is more and more common with large, full featured, client side JavaScript apps. Whilst the behaviour this gives is definitely an improvement to the user experience, implementing this with the location hash has some shortcomings.

Thankfully, as with everything else on the web, HTML5 is here to solve all your problems, with two methods and an event, pushState, replaceState & onpopstate.

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