The Official OpenRain Blog

Mutually beneficial, win-win partnerships should be built to last. And to create all that good, predictable business mojo, you need to incentivize participation on both ends. We’ve done this in the past, but have not created a formal program… until now.

Today we’re officially introducing OpenRain Partner programs to all our clients, vendors and other affiliates to incentivize these lasting bonds. Clients and vendors with formal relationships established in over three month intervals will now receive discounts on our already competitive development rates. When qualified as a marketing partner, businesses complementary to OpenRain’s core market (such as vertical partners in the design, hosting and support spaces) are also eligible to receive  four-figure referral bonus as well as free co-branded marketing materials!

Good referrals from trusted sources to reputable businesses are the cornerstone of organic business development, so participation in all of these programs will be limited and provided only to other reputable firms and individuals. Contact us to discuss!

preston.lee Business, General Announcements announcement, client, openrain, partner, program, referral, vendor

We’re happy to announce that OpenRain’s free/Open Source software projects–including all Ruby gems, Rails plugins, system scripts and other code previously released for free under OpenRain copyright–is now available for consumption via the Apache License v2.0. It may take a while to update various LICENSE, NOTICE and README files, but rest assured, if you’re using one of our F/OSS projects you can now tell your boss it’s licensed in an OSI-approved manner.

preston.lee Community, General Announcements announcement, apache, free, license, open source, openrain

New phone number: 1.623.691.7869

Try to contain your excitement, but we just implemented a shiny new phone system. It’s not exactly something you’d ask Santa for, but a critical piece of business infrastructure nonetheless. Last year we decided to try a Skype-based strategy and, well… let’s just say we had smiles when we turned on the new system.

We chose Cisco/Linksys SPA942 IP phones (currently ~$115 from Newegg) using VoicePulse SIP services in California proxied by an Asterisk server on our internal network. The awesome part is that we’ve been using the new system for about a week, and have seen crazy better call quality at negligible additional usage cost. The SPA942 has an outstanding price/performance ratio, giving you four lines, built-in web server configuration, PoE, voicemail, headset, tons of OSD menu options and other schwag for a little over 100 bones per unit. For all practical purposes that’s more than enough juice for a developer who only makes a couple calls per day.   

The increased SIP quality is also showing about 4x the bandwidth usage of our previous Skype hardware. While we could have a crappy Skype-to-Non-Skype call at ~4K/s before, a better SIP call takes about ~10K/s/channel, as reported by our T1 gateway. Using QoS prioritization at the border we’ve managed to avoid quality issues so far, but time will tell.

So, if you regularly have conference calls with us, we’ll probably give you our brand new 1.623.691.7869 number and a nice extension to dial into!

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This year we got serious about consistent branding, and revisited everything from our logo to color scheme to font choices. So for Saul’s first couple of weeks at OpenRain, we tasked him with implementing a new CSS style and footer section on our .com site. The content of the site will continue to change dramatically over the next week or so, but we all love the new direction! Check it out. And if you like the new direction too, give Saul a tweet!

preston.lee Design, General Announcements announcement, css, logo, openrain, twitter, website, www

We’re ecstatic to officially announce The OpenRain Alliance: a free resource program for Phoenix’s diverse breadth of technical entrepreneurs needing a hand in getting a startup off the ground. This is a free program for bright, motivated people such as yourself to get quick and easy access to physical resources normally not available to early-stage companies. This milestone in OpenRain history also means you have zero excuses to unleash your potential upon the world. Apply now.

We’re also proud to introduce and feature the first OpenRain ally! Encodium, LLC. While OpenRain is highly specialized in the web development space–primarily using Ruby-based technologies–Encodium is generally marketed and offers development services in Java, .NET, C/C++, PHP, you name it. They’re bright, motivated, and if you ask us for a referral in that space, we’ll fill you in on Encodium. Thanks to Encodium for being our guinea pigs; now let’s change the world!

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Elite OpenRain ninja Remi Taylor will be presenting his approach to test-driven Rails development tomorrow afternoon at 1:30pm at OpenRain HQ. That’s Wednesday, October 8th for approximately 1 hour. All are welcome. No reservations required. Forecast: 99 degrees with a 90% chance of awesome.

You can grab the latest presentation file here. Remi’s synopsis…

Read more…

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Notwithstanding a change of heart from Apple following yesterdays announcement, the first Phoenix iPhone Developer Group meeting will be held at 6pm on Wednesday, October 22nd at the OpenRain office. We’ll have several give-a-ways, food, a presentation by iPhone application developer Brad O’Hearne, and a whole lot of fun!

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Getting Started With Rails evening tutorial workshop with Preston Lee.
Joe Developer at OpenRain HQ
Wednesday, September 27th, 2008. 6pm.
Light dinner provided.

This event is for developers new to or otherwise interested in web development using Ruby on Rails. Laptops encouraged. WiFi provided. See you there!

preston.lee Uncategorized announcement, event, free, howto, joe developer, rails, ror, ruby

Noon, Pacific Seafood Buffet. Bring $10 for all-you-can-eat sushi and other great buffet eats. (There’s much more than seafood, and veggie stuff too.) Table reserved under “Lee”. Give-a-ways provided by O’Reilly Media…

• High Performance MySQL
• Understanding MySQL Internals
• iPhone: The Missing Manual (2nd ed., covers the iPhone 3G)

Map: http://tinyurl.com/5f5jfj
Venue: http://www.pacificseafoodbuffet.net/
Sit Next To: Someone you don’t know!

preston.lee Uncategorized announcement, event, food, geek-n-eat, lunch, networking, noon, phoenix, reminder

OpenRain is a U.S. company with U.S. staff. The value of direct, barrier-free, native-language communication outweighs any perceived cost savings of outsourcing our niche, not to mention it’s a lot more fun to work in the same office and time zone. For a typical 3-month project with 2 developers, it’s not uncommon in an outsourced environment to need a full-time project manager on both client and developer sides just to manage tasks, meetings, legal, logistical issues etc.; an unnecessary cost which alone has increased the bill 50%. By keeping operations local, we’re able to remain far more agile in a far lighter development environment.

Nevertheless, we periodically talk to a potential client who is dead set on outsourcing work to “save money”. While we’ll respectfully disagree with you, we’ll kindly connect your business to a new sister shop located in the Ukraine who exclusively focuses on outsourcing, something which OpenRain doesn’t do. Both OpenRain and Railsware focus on Ruby development for U.S. companies, and are pleased to announce this partnership so we may jointly work towards building a bigger, better Ruby development industry as a whole. We’d love to have you in it!

preston.lee Uncategorized announcement, openrain, partner, rails, railsware, ruby