Hi Glenn. So can you explain to us what exactly Ruby on Rails is?

Ruby on Rails is a web application development framework built on the Ruby programming language. Rails is a Model View Controller or MVC framework which means that its easy to keep your business logic out of the presentation layer, thus reducing bloat and development costs. Frameworks like Rails come with a set of reusable components and conventions that make building web applications much easier, and therefore read faster. Rails takes away the pain of lots of stuff, like setting up how your data is stored, doing low level browser interactions and securing a site against common web attacks.

There’s a growing demand for the simplicity that Ruby On Rails offers, driven by businesses, and programmers, who want speed and agility in building applications. This is evidenced by Ruby on Rails being used for some 235,000 websites, including top companies such as Amazon, Groupon, Shopify, Basecamp, Highrise, Hulu, Slideshare, Zendesk, YellowPages and GetSatisfaction, to name a few.

What we really like about Rails is that it’s Open Source software, with a very talented and active community. On the language side, Ruby itself is a dynamic, object-oriented language, whose popularity has soared, partly because of Rails, and partly because it’s terrific to program with. Ruby  applications are now serving hundreds of millions of web users, so it’s a serious alternative to Java, PHP and Python.

Why did you decide to specialize in Ruby on Rails development?

Professionally, I think that once I saw how productive I was in building web apps in Ruby on Rails, I was hooked. Coming from a Perl background, I found Ruby had many similarities and many wonderful extras. I went from an Angry Perl Developer to a Happy Ruby Bloke. Plus the Ruby Rails community continues to impress me with it’s breadth of projects, depth of talent and willingness to help others.

From a business perspective, I find Rails allows us to focus on solving the business problems that customers are facing, rather than a lot of low-level busywork. Savvy clients don’t want to manage a bunch of techies, they want to work people who can bridge the gap between their business and technology.

Tell us why a strong community around Ruby and Ruby on Rails is important to you as a developer?

Having a strong community for your chosen technology gives you a lot of confidence in tackling a problem with it. Either someone has partially solved it and made it available to others, thanks to Open Source, or you’ll quickly find relevant resources with a modicum of research. Or you can dig deeper yourself, since the documentation or code is often of a very high standard, possibly due to the strong culture of testing in the Ruby Rails community.

If all else fails, you always get help from other developers. The technology and the community are possible because of these people who give up their time to write awesome software and share it with others. These people make me warm and fuzzy, and challenge me to become a better developer.

Okay, so tell us a bit about the work that you do?

At Siyelo, we use the web to help create new companies, and to improve the technology of existing ones. We’re a team of developers and designers who love to build web products that scratch an itch. We’re geeks for hire, if you will.

We work a lot with internet startups and with businesses that want to streamline an internal process. Recently we’ve also done a lot of interesting work in the health sector in Africa, building web-based financial applications that help improve oversight and reporting.

From your experience, what do you think are some of the key ingredients for developing a successful web application?

I spent many years struggling on IT projects where developers were too far removed from the business side of things. Firstly, to deliver what the client really wanted, and secondly, innovate. From this experience I found that to build a successful web app, or any reasonably sized software product, you’ve got to create an environment of open communication and regular feedback. To the point that the client and the development team communicate directly. It’s not always easy, and often needs to be facilitated, but there’s nothing like being in a product demonstration meeting where the client says to the team “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted”.

Also remember, design is important. The user interface is the software. Write tests first before you code, automate everything, and hire good developers that understand all these points.

You have a team of developers in Europe and a team in Cape Town. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of working in a distributed fashion?

That’s correct, Siyelo started in Skopje, Macedonia, over three years ago, and we’ve grown to work really well as a distributed team. It has the advantage of allowing us to tap into two talent pools of highly skilled people; and forcing us early on to develop the systems for distributed development, which are also used to coordinate with our overseas clients. Some of the tools include lean project management practices like SCRUM and XP, Pivotal Tracker, Balsamiq, Campfire, Skype, Google Hangouts, git and GitHub.

Of course, distributed teams have their challenges and solutions. Different time zones, yet luckily our flexi-time policy helps. Communication, including plenty of Skype video chats; and cohesion so that we share as many projects across geographical boundaries as we can, helping us to develop that mutual respect for each other.

What new technologies are you looking forward to experimenting with in 2012?

Rails 3.2, Redis, Resque, Responsive design, improving user experiences with Javascript/jQuery.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Glenn. We look forward to seeing more great things from Siyelo this year. Follow Glenn on Twitter here.

Loads and loads of resources on (yep, you guessed it) all things Facebook, including stats on most popular FB Fan Pages*, Apps & FB Connect usage (size + growth).

Look, I’m the first guy to tell you that stats are only stats, and shouldn’t be viewed in isolation, but AllFacebook gives a healthy balance between cold, hard facts and opinion. Thus, providing readers withinformed opinions and observations – something that is often lacking amongst our fellow bloggers (like these guys).

As a marketer though, going through AllFacebook’s resources, viewing the best-of-the-best (number-wise) on Facebook, it makes my job easier to identify & implement best practices for growing brand communities on South Africa’s biggest online playground.

*Seems Facebook users love to sleep – I (love) SLEEP’s fan page has 4,460,499 fanzzzzzzzzzz….

This tweet referred to Josh Bernoff (one of Forrester Research’s bigwig-cum-analysts)’s post: “Why Social Media Sucks” on Ad Age Digital Next’s blog.

Forrester research

Josh gives us an overview of his, qualified, views of the various terminologies bandied around by digital marketers so often – most noteworthy the inaccurate and over-hyped use of the phrase: ‘Social Media’ (something that we’ve also pointed out at our Heavy Chef Joburg event on ’Smoke, Mirrors & Social Media’ here and here)

Josh, specifically referring to the baggage that comes along with the word “media”, says:

“Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way. The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way as it can be. Nobody controls it, not even Facebook, which found it can’t even change its own terms of service… and while, as in media, you can advertise in social network sites, that is the least interesting use for them.”

Prefering to define the whole world of people connecting and drawing strength from each other online as the Social Web, Josh in his post also provide’s some clarity on his take on words such as ’social applications’ and ’social networks’.

Love your work Josh!