There’s this saying about the profession of writing, that for every young writer, there is a phase where his work is so heavily influenced by his favorite authors that he may as well have just copied whole sentences and swapped out some of the words. It isn’t plagiarism so much as the inevitable by-product of learning a complex craft. When you’re starting out, having something solid to build off of is invaluable. (In the software world, I would argue that we have something similar — we call them APIs. And we call the stuff we build with them mashups.)
SyndeoLabs.com is a compendium of our team’s collective journey towards Software Zen. Within its pages we’ll talk about the new technologies that we’re playing around with, the new ideas we’re developing, and of course, the shiny new web toys that we build. There are 9 people on the team as I write this, each with their own field of expertise, experience and interests. You can check out our individual profiles here.
In keeping with tradition, we’re using quite a bit of third-party technology for our Lab. Most of the blog entries you read here will be an aggregation of our individual blogs, a process which we streamlined and automated using the Feed Normalizer RubyGem. We’re also aggregating the team’s , which will be collected into a single blog entry once every 24 hours. (We used Twitter4r, the Twitter RubyGem to get that working.) Our avatar images are via the Gravatar service, which turned out to be trivial to integrate with a Rails application and gives us a consistent identity when commenting on our peers’ blogs. Our single javascript dependency (Prototype) is hosted externally as well, via . Lastly, the screenshots for each of our projects were created using Webthumb, which provides us with an easy way to display pseudo-real-time images of our various products.
Other things we’re working to add include using Dapper and to consolidate our various social network profiles, and adding development histories on each of our projects (possibly tied into our versioning software). The former depends on some legal implications, while the latter depends on audience interest.
If there’s anything you can take away from having read this far down the page, it’s that we like sharing new ideas and trying new things out. The consequence of this reckless experimentation is, of course, that not everything works exactly as expected all of the time. Hopefully, you’ll bear with us during those moments, and just enjoy the unpredictability of the ride ahead.