We’ve been working with Eloy ever since he impressed us with his RubyCocoa demo at the 2007 RubyEnRails conference, and we are very happy that he recently decided to join the Fingertips team. He is not only a great developer but also a very nice guy. It is a joy to have him on board.

Eloy has been a Ruby developer for over four years. He is an active member of the RubyCocoa community where he started the Rucola project, a project that allows you to write RubyCocoa apps without XCode. He lives in Amsterdam on a boat together with his wife Dionne and their two cats.

Please join us in welcoming Sam Aaron to our team.

Sam has been active in the Ruby and Rails communities for some years; he founded the Newcastle Ruby and Rails user group and was a speaker at RailsConf Europe this year. He enjoys writing and regularly publishes Ruby articles for InfoQ. Sam was also the technical reviewer for ‘Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax’ from Apress and a contributor to ‘The Rails Way’ published in the Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series .

In addition to being a fond advocate of both Ruby and Rails, Sam is interested in the aesthetics of programming languages, language oriented programming, and domain specific languages, which were the general subjects of his Ph.D. thesis.

Sam loves cycling (which is great here in Amsterdam) and also enjoys getting out into the countryside where he likes to walk, scramble and camp.

We’re very happy to welcome Norbert Crombach to the Fingertips team. He started this morning.

Norbert has been working with Ruby on Rails since the very first public release when a good friend – who has since moved to Io – convinced him Ruby really was better than Perl.

Norbert always struck us as a talented and extremely bright developer who seemed to be doing very well on his own. He did however get fed up with the business side of running his own company, which made him decide to join us so he could spend more time doing actual development work.

For the next few months Norbert will be working remotely from Eindhoven while he’s trying to find a place to live here in Amsterdam.

We have very nice clients. They leave us little testing jewels like this one.

Email from Skype:

You’re receiving this email around 30 days before your Skype Credit balance expires. Skype Credit expires 180 days after your last purchase or SkypeOut call. If you’re not using your balance we need to expire the credit sooner or later to comply with normal business accounting rules. Not very exciting, but true.

If you have any idea what these ‘normal business accounting rules’ exactly are, please let me know.

We recently received a two page REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL for a ‘Social Network Site’:

[…] has developed a concept that requires the development of a niche social network solution, incorporating some of the most innovative features of Web 2.0: RoR, Social Networks with extensive search features, Web Services, Blogs, Tagging, Photo Management, RSS, Internal Messaging, etc. Users are able to sign up, create a profile with pictures and personal data, set preferences and demographic information. This site differentiates itself from the other social networks by providing innovative features in a specific niche.

[…] would like the site to contain the following features.

• User Registration
• User Profile Setup
• User addition to a Network
• Photo management
• Ability to post personal blogs
• Ability to comment on a members profile
• Messaging capabilities
• RSS integration
• Ability to search the social network with varying search parameters
• External partner data feed and integration through SOAP/XML API’s
• Extensive niche specific features (further details in Phase 2).

Based on this information, we were asked to ‘provide a detailed estimate with breakdown by task (description of task, duration, total number of hours, etc.). ’ and to ‘a timeline for completion of the project (start date, completion date, milestones)’. Within 5 days.

Maybe I’m being arrogant here, but I don’t see how someone can realistically expect a developer to write a fixed time, fixed budget proposal based on this game of buzzword bingo. Can you?