This is an UPDATE post by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who has been with us for the past week on work experience. (Original post here)

Well, I’ve been working on my project for the week and here’s the update that you were promised! (And stick with the post, there’s a live demo!) I haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped but I have learnt a lot whilst here. See the previous post for more on that and what I had planned.

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Note: This post is for PHP and Ruby Developers based in or near Dublin, Ireland.

There’s no denying that Cloud Computing has been a particularly hot space for the last year. I’m sure many of you have given Amazon Web Services (Infrastructure as a Service) and Google App Engine (Platform as a Service) a go by now, if not actually using them to run software of your own making.

In the last year the buzz from Microsoft on their Azure offering has been gradually getting louder, to the point where they are now rolling it out. Microsoft’s proposition is interesting as, in simple terms, it’s a like a mix between the IaaS and PaaS models that are pursued by Amazon and Google.  As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric — in particular PHP and Ruby. (more…)

A very short post on a Friday afternoon.

This is an open invite to anyone who works on the web, be it as a designer or developer, a startup entrepreneur or in social media.

Our door is always open for coffee, wifi and shop-talk

We’re based here on Dame St., just drop me an email - eamon@echolibre.com

What is Funconf?

It’s an unusual conference, presented by myself, Eamon Leonard, and my friend Paul Campbell.

Funconf takes place on Saturday 24th April, 2010.

It was inspired by JSconf.eu, an amazing JavaScript conference we both attended in Berlin last November, and by StartupCrawl an event Paul attended in San Francisco also in November.

Funconf is for anyone who designs, develops or works on the web and loves what they do.

It’s a very small conference, with room for only 70 people.

Funconf is about encouraging conversation between conference goers and speakers on subjects they’re passionate about.

It’s a moving conference and will start and end in Dublin, with some stops along the way.

It will take place on two specially converted buses, where the seating faces into the aisle, bringing an intimate (or at least interesting) feel  to the event, and encourage conversation.

We hope it will be a conference that people enjoy and remember.

It will feature some really cool speakers, who will tell us about their experiences with working on fun stuff for the web

• Joe Hewitt - creator of Firebug and Facebook’s iPhone App
• Matthew Inman - creator of The Oatmeal
• Marshall Kirkpatrick - of ReadWriteWeb
• Michael Lopp - author of Managing Humans, aka Rands (in Repose)
• Jonathan Siegel - seed founder of RightScale, founder of ELC Technologies
• Joe Stump - co-founder of SimpleGeo, ex lead dev Digg

Funconf is a simple idea; it does what it says on the tin… we want it to be fun.

The latest information on Funconf can be found on funconf.com and by following @funconf.

A limited number of early bird tickets are on sale now - http://funconf.eventbrite.com/

A lot has happened in the last 12 months. It being the first day back at work of the New Year, I wanted to write a post about some of the highlights of our first full (calendar) year in business.

Startups

The year started off well enough. We’d just finished a two month project for Mobivox, a Canadian VoIP startup. We’d been building their billing system and integrating it with their VoIP system since our first day of trading in October. The project went well, and Mobivox was later sold to Sabse Technologies, a company founded by Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmail’s Co-Founders.

In early January we decided to shake up our business model a bit. We’d previously taken the route of web developers / PHP guns for hire. Ireland is a pretty small market, and we found that sufficiently differentiating ourselves from all the other web developers in the country to be no easy task. Given the broadness of the term itself, we decided to focus on our strengths on those that need them the most: startups. We also decided that in order to do this, we’d need some extra brains. (more…)

Anyone that goes to conferences knows that it’s nearly always the same people speaking. This is not bad, but this world is vast and the potential amount of decent speakers with very interesting subject and even more knowledgeable ideas is even greater.

In an attempt to identify the reasons why the speakers presence is so repetitive, I nailed it down to the diffidence factor. Today we were discussing about the community on IRC and the issue of low amount of new speakers came up again. So I’m bringing the idea back up to the surface

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This past weekend we went along to Dublin’s OSS BarCamp. There were some really great talks, Stuart Langridge’s Javascript presentation was a highlight. Jaime Hemmett’s talk on using Git for version control was useful and informative. Paul Biggar’s talk on PHC, the Open Source PHP Compiler, was thought provoking and certainly caused a few grumbles from PHP guys like myself in the audience ;). JD and myself managed to catch up with him after and talk through some of his ideas over a drink. (more…)