Seeing how I haven't posted a single thing in over a month, I can see how you might expect the worst. Have no fear, I have not been abducted by aliens, nor have I been jailed for embezzlement (yet). I have merely been toiling day and night with my Intridea teammates on an exciting new project for our VisualCV clients. I am pleased to annouce that all of our hard work has finally come to fruition, and www.visualcv.com launched early this morning.

From the start we knew VisualCV would require a lot of effort and long hours, and we were right! Thanks to the coding efficiency Ruby and Ruby on Rails allow us, as well as the agile methods we put in place, we were able to meet very tight deadlines.

VisualCV aims to replace the traditional paper resume with an online version that allows you to present images, audio, and video alongside traditional resume content. The VisualCV management team and advisory team is impressive, headed up by Phillip Merrick, former CEO and Chairman of webMethods, so we're expecting good things from this endeavor.

Stay tuned for updates on VisualCV, as well as some more technical posts about some of the technology we used and some tips and tricks I've picked up.

Check VisualCV out now!

[UPDATE]

VisualCV has been generating a lot of media buzz so far - check out some of the coverage below:

• TechCrunch
• Washington Post (registration may be required)
• See the official press release

Intridea is starting to get a national reputation for Ruby on Rails knowledge - several of us were recently contacted by eWeek.com for an article on Ruby on Rails 2.0. Adam Bair and I both had some comments that they chose to run - check it out to see what we had to say:

Ruby on Rails 2.0 Users Give Thumbs Up

The 2007 RubyConf was a couple of weeks ago (Nov 2nd-4th) in Charlotte, NC . I attended with a few of my Intridea colleagues – Pradeep, Michael, and Jeremy. So this post is not all that timely, and I imagine anything worthwhile to say about RubyConf 2007 has already been blogged about to death. Not only that, but I was part of a panel at last week’s DCRUG meeting, where we discussed RubyConf, so I have already probably talked the topic to death. And yet, still I write… must be the egotist in me that assumes my 2 subscribers want, nay – need, to know there weren’t enough men’s restrooms, or there should have been more coffee on the last day. Here on the Better Endeavor Blog, we get into the meat of things and tell you what’s really important.

Intridea has officially entered three products into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-Up Challenge. We're very excited about the products, all of which should be launching on November 5th.

Scalr

Scalr is a complete turn-key hosting solution that’s self-curing and self-scaling. It based on EC2 and provides an easy, web-based interface for setting up and managing your servers.

MediaPlug

With MediaPlug, website operators can add social media (images, audio, and video) to a website in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, and without the need to learn complex video transcoding systems. In addition, uploads are offloaded to MediaPlug servers to reduce the burden on the customer website.

SocNet

SocNet is built on Intridea’s MediaPlug and Scalr products, and allows customers to quickly create a social networking site that can scale to millions of users easily.

Hi, I'm Chris, your friendly neighborhood Ruby on Rails programmer. For the last 10 years I've moonlighted as a freelance web developer, spending my evening and weekends coding and designing, while also holding down full-time jobs. Most recently I've been employed by George Washington University, where I've worked full-time as a web developer for the past 2.5 years. Today was my last day at GW, and is also my last day as moonlighting freelance developer.

Why the big changes? I've accepted a position at Intridea, a DC-based Ruby on Rails development shop. Though I enjoyed my time at GW, and my many late nights of coding for my freelance business, I'm really looking forward to focusing all my efforts toward building Intridea. I've already been chatting with some of the guys there, and I know I'm going to learn a lot, because they're all really sharp. I'm also going to be able to play with cutting-edge Rails stuff that I've wanted to take for a whirl - stuff like unobtrusive javascript, Amazon Web Services, sass, and Rspec (among others).

Making the leap is helping to kickstart a few other projects that I've been putting off for a while. This blog, for one. I've been meaning to put this blog together for almost a year now, constantly having ideas that made me say "hey, I should blog about that." Now I have a place to do that. I'll be cross-posting some of the more technical articles on the Intridea blog, but some of the content here will be unique. I hope this blog will eventually be a good place for Rails tips, tricks, and wisdom, though you'll have to be the judge of that!