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Wow, another year over already. It feels like it was just recently that I wrote a summary of 2010. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so it’s about time that I try to sum up this year. And what a year it’s been.

One of the highlights this year, just like last year, was our conference Nordic Ruby. I feel like this year was even better than last year, with amazing speakers such as Chad Fowler and Aaron Patterson, a party on an 18th century style ship, and 150 fantastic attendees. Next year we’re trying something quite different, and I think it’s going to be awesome. Keep a look out for the new web site for Nordic Ruby 2012.

Aaron Patterson at Nordic Ruby 2011. Photo by Athega.

Right around the same time as Nordic Ruby, we said goodbye to our partners at Edithouse, and moved to our own space. Our new office is in a fantastic 19th century building, the old offices of the famous Gothenburg camera makers Hasselblad. We love our new office, and others seem to like it too, as we made the finals in a competition for Sweden’s nicest office. Feel free to come visit us, we love having guests. If you can’t make it, check out the pictures of our new office.

We didn’t just move out from Edithouse’s office, but we also bought back their shares in Elabs. Right now I’m the full owner of the company. The main reason for this was that the collaboration that we envisioned when I started Elabs together with Edithouse never happened. In 2008 and 2009 Edithouse’s business changed, and we set our own course. Our own office and ownership reflects our independence, and that feels great. Personally, I still want to say Thank you to Edithouse for helping get Elabs off the ground in 2008.

Another side of our move was that we decided to close down our Stockholm office. While we had some great projects there, for clients like Bonnier’s Mag+ and TV4 Play, it was hard having people spread out. One of the best things about Elabs is our culture. Our way of working together, and our camaraderie. Extending that across the country wasn’t easy, and it didn’t feel fair to Ingemar and Dennis, working by themselves in Stockholm. We asked them if they wanted to join us in Gothenburg, but they decided to stay in Stockholm, and are now working for our clients Mynewsdesk and Mag+. I wish them the best of luck there.

To make up for the loss of Ingemar and Dennis, we’ve started hiring again! In August, we welcomed Kim Burgestrand to our team. Kim had been freelancing with us while he was on a break from his studies, and we’re very happy that he decided to join us full-time. We’ll be hiring more developers next year, so if you’re interested in joining a fantastic team, let us know!

In 2011, we really ramped up our public speaking. We spoke at a whole bunch of different conferences all over the world. Here’s a list, with links to videos of most of them:

• April: Scottish Ruby Conference in Edinburgh, UK: CJ & Jonas, The Front End Testing Frontier (video)
• May: RailsConf in Baltimore, USA: CJ & Jonas, Getting Started with JavaScript Testing
• September: RubyConf in New Orleans, USA: Jonas, Code design and the science of pleasure (video)
• October: ArrrCamp in Ghent, Belgium: Jonas, Practical testing for assorted languages (video)
• November: New Context Conference in Tokyo, Japan: CJ, Integrated Design and Development
• November: RubyC in Kiev, Ukraine: Jonas, Full stack testing of your Ruby and JavaScript applications (video)
• November: SWDC in Stockholm, Sweden: Jonas, Testing Ikebana (video)
• December: Northern Lights in Aberdeen, UK: CJ, Craftsmanship Panel

Phew! Quite intense! In between working on client projects and speaking at conferences, our developers still found time to release some great open source projects. Nicklas released his Rails account management engine bento, and Anders released the model factory jay_z and the restful HTTP library resto. Kim did a bunch of work on Hallon, his delicious Ruby bindings to the official Spotify API. Jonas released capybara 1.0, an integration testing library used by most Ruby developers. Later in the year, he also released the brand new library turnip, an alternative to Cucumber.

In recognition for his outstanding open source efforts, Jonas received a Ruby Hero Award at RailsConf in May. We’re so proud of him!

During the year we’ve had the opportunity to work with some fantastic people. We’ve worked with some great companies in the US (such as Engine Yard, Stackmob, and LivingSocial), as well as some cool Swedish startups (like Naturkartan and Saltside), and some big established companies like TV4 and Bonnier. A big thank you to all of our clients! We’re looking forward to more great projects next year.

Yesterday, our last day of work this year, we said goodbye to Antony. Antony’s been working with us for almost two years, and he’s been a fantastic part of the team. Now he’s striking out on his own with a project related to his other big passion, photography, and we wish him the best of luck. Thank you Antony for all your great work, and for keeping our spirits high at the office. We’ll miss you!

Now were taking a break over the holidays, and we’ll be back on January 2nd, ready for another exciting year.

Happy holidays!

/ CJ & the Elabs team

PS. If you want to keep up with what we’re doing, follow us on Twitter or check out our Facebook page. Thanks!

The Lean Startup Camp

Inspiration. If I have to pick one word to describe The New Context Conference held by Digital Garage in Tokyo November 3rd to 4th, it’s inspiration. CJ was invited to speak about integrated design and development.

The conference, also called Lean Startup Camp, was inspired by the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. A book that teaches entrepreneurs how to be more innovative, stop wasting people’s time and be more successful. The most frequently used words during the conference talks were lean, agile and design. Something that Digital Garage hopes will inspire the attendees to go out and change the way Japanese companies work today.

You need a compass, not a map

When working the agile way you need to know what direction you’re heading but not the precise way. Joi Ito talked about how things change along the way and how you should embrace that.

Our friend Ian McFarland, CTO at Digital Garage, held a keynote about the importance of design to make better software. A subject that the speakers and panels kept returning to throughout the day.

The first panel discussed how design is about experience, not looks, and how a designer’s most important job is to understand the user. It’s important to be agile about design, doing things in small iterations, doing a lot of testing and getting feedback. Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is discovery, a learning process.

Why build something until you know if it will work?

Kate Rutter talked about how to use a MVP, Minimum Viable Product, to get useful feedback from users before investing too much time in building a full product. It can be a sketch on a paper or a really small application. Our friends at Hyper Tiny emphasised the importance of finding the one important thing about a product and focusing on that. Say no to all other features.

Agile Blues

There seem to be a lot of rules when working agile. If you are new to the agile way this can feel discouraging, do you really need to follow the rules? Yes and No.

I like the comparison Joe O’Brien made between the agile way and blues music. There are a lot of rules, but when you know the rules you can break them and build/compose exceptional products/music.

Preparing, Sharing and Caring

CJ talked about how we work at Elabs, the importance of letting designers and developers work together. You should start every project with the whole team, preparing together. If everyone is in from the beginning there will be a better understanding between designers, developers and the client, which will result in a better product. During the project designers and developers can be more efficient by working in the same code base and pair programming. Last, the most important part is that developers care about the design and designers care about the code. Getting rid of the “not my job” mentality.

Get feedback

The first day was wrapped up with a talk from Janice Fraser. According to her the most important thing is to get out of the building, get to know your customers before you build your product. Learn who is going to use your product and what they are going to use it for. Make MVPs and remember that it’s hard to build a new product, it takes time. She emphasised the continuous cycle of: build - measure - learn, or think - make - check.

We had a great time in Tokyo and met a lot of interesting people. The Lean Startup Camp was a very well produced conference and we are very happy to have been a part of it.

Arigatō gozaimasu.

The planning for Nordic Ruby 2011 is in full progress. If you are interested in sponsoring, please take a look at the sponsorship prospectus on the site; http://nordicruby.org.

Last year was a great success with a hundred attendees from Sweden, other Nordic and European countries and the USA.

We will continue with the much appreciated concept of 30 minute talks and 30 minute breaks, a half and half conference. This gives you a great opportunity to meet and socialise with a lot of people in the community from all around the world. There will off course be great speakers as well!

We can already announce Chad Fowler as a speaker! Chad Fowler is program chair for RubyConf and RailsConf, and author of The Passionate Programmer. We are very glad to have him.

The conference will be held at the same great venue as last year. The dinner party will be held at a new place and we’ll have some other new details. More information in the future.

You can download the wrap from Nordic Ruby 2010 on the website and also look at the sponsorship prospectus. The full site for Nordic Ruby 2011 will be launched at the end of January.

June 16th - 18th, save the date for Nordic Ruby 2011 in Gothenburg, Sweden. (The conference days are on Friday and Saturday).

Please contact us at info@nordicruby.org if you are interested in sponsoring the event.

Two weeks ago, Jonas and I were in New Orleans for the 10th annual RubyConf. This was my 2nd RubyConf, but I had a very different experience this time. This time I was one of the speakers. And I was giving two presentations.

The Front End Testing Frontier

One of the presentations was an extended version of the Front End Testing Frontier presentation I gave at Mountain.rb in October. This time I was fortunate enough to have my colleague Jonas Nicklas as a co-presenter. Jonas is the author of the testing libraries Capybara and Evergreen, our primary tools for JavaScript testing at Elabs.

I’ve uploaded the slides from the Front End Testing Frontier presentation, but they’re pretty sparse. Video should be available in a few weeks, and I’ll update this post then.

Socialist Software Development

My other presentation was titled Socialist Software Development. I came up with the title after seeing a clip from The Daily Show about socialism in Sweden. I saw some similarities between the principles of socialism and agile development, and since it seems most Americans are terrified by the mere mention of socialism, I thought it would be fun to go to the US and talk about it. The essence of my talk came from this passage from the British Labour Party constitution:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that, by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create, for each of us, the means to realise our true potential, and, for all of us, a community in which power, wealth, and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.

While I drew some inspiration from my flippant title, I mostly talked about how Sharing is Caring, and how important that is in software development.

Giving such a “soft” talk was quite a bit harder than giving a technical presentation, but I was very happy with how it went. I’ve posted the slides for the Socialist Software Development presentation as well, and I’ll update when the video is online.

What’s Next?

I’ve been to a lot of conferences this year, and it’s been great presenting at Mountain.rb and RubyConf. The next conference on our schedule is the Scottish Ruby Conference in April next year. All the Elabs developers will be there, and I’m really looking forward to that. Then there’s our own conference, Nordic Ruby, in June. This year was amazing, and it looks like the one next year will be even better.

I don’t have any confirmed speaking events for next year, but I would love to do a couple and continue to improve as a speaker. But I think I’ll limit it to one presentation per conference. Giving two at RubyConf was a bit overwhelming.

Today we are 4 people at the office, half of the crew. Jimmy and Johannes, our designers, left on Monday for Build which is a design conference in Belfast. And yesterday CJ and Jonas flew to RubyConf in New Orleans were they will be giving the talk: The Front End Testing Frontier. CJ will also give a talk about Socialist Software Development.

On Tuesday we had a short but very appreciated visit by Dave Hoover, who flew by Gothenburg to see us and join Got.rb in the evening. Early on Wednesday he continued his journey by train to Malmö and Øredev Developer Conference.

A quiet day at the office.