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!

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!

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!

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

Test-driven development has changed the way that many programmers design, write, test, refactor, and maintain their code. Myself included.

In this presentation, I’ll be introducing the concept of test-driven development and walking through the process of test-driving a typical Rails application.

This presentation is intended for Rails developers who:

• are new to testing
• have been testing, but not test-driving
• have been test-driving, but not with RSpec
• have been test-driving with RSpec and hope to learn a few new tricks :)

Along with writing specifications for Models, Views, & Controllers, I hope to cover:

• writing user stories (acceptance tests)
• creating custom RSpec matchers
• continious integration using Autotest / CruiseControl.rb
• testing JavaScript & AJAX

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

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!

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!