I feel Chris was a very intelligent human, who conveyed complex information, in a human-digestable manner, that many others of us struggle with.

I saw him present in Manchester at our ruby meetup, and later online.

We interacted a little about jobs at Shopify. But there didn't seem to be a part-time option for me. Something I need due to some health issues of my own.

I wonder if we as a group of ruby loving people, and the wider tech industry, can learn from this? I don't know.

It seems no matter what was said, the outcome would have been the same? I guess we'll never know. It's likely that those who worked with him, and were trusted, will perhaps say more intime. I hope they do not feel bad in any way. But perhaps there's aspects his family and close colleagues will be able to share intime, when things are less hurtful so we can learn a little from how to help others in this situation?

Big hugs to those close to Chris. And big respect to those writing amazing blogs in his memory.

Hugs to all.

Glad it was saved. Other early contenders for the 'first' title include the ones from Manchester: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1

Wow. So 1950s. I wonder if this was the very first data visualisation then?

er, what? People have been making graphs of data for hundreds of years, if not much longer.

https://thinkinsights.net/digital/data-visualization-history...

Great article

Florence Nightingale used charts. See https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/aug/13/floren...

I've debating about doing this in the UK with a 32ft shipping container, and possibly straw bail externally for insulation, and a water collector on the roof for grey usage.

Seen some great projects in London & Brighton, but non in Manchester for homes yet. Though there's been a great use for offices in the Sharp project.

Anyone else in the UK looking at this sort of thing?

One question: Why the wheels if you're only going to move it every so often - say a couple of years?

I wonder how many are merely 'consulting' or not even that, just on a 3 month tourist?

Hey, this is sound advice.

I've a very early days version of a travel bucket list app, that I've geographically limited to one city - my own, as the place that you can fly out from. I know that I want user's who are more travel-orientated than typical as early adopters.

I've been building up a social profile on facebook, with high quality articles/links, and interacting with travel focused people on twitter. I've added links back to the application from the facebook article. And, it feels like I'm doing this right. But, it's not yet gaining much traction, whilst actually soaking up a lot of time, and I feel like I'm not in a coding-mindset if I do too much of this that day.

I've got a small bunch of users, who are seeded from friends and friends of friends. Even a couple of randoms. Today I'm sending out a site update email, and showing them what they can do to help, as well as showing them the plan for 2014, and some interesting travel information.

I hope it makes a difference, as I agree that you need a 100 or so users initially. I've been talking to an airport about physical advertising, and I think it's too early for that at the moment, but I'm working on getting it at a reduced rate.

Ultimately, it maybe that I've tried to engage with people too early in the development process, and I need to get on with development. Tricky, though as once you start engaging it feels that you really should keep those channels going.

Anyway. Basically, I'm agreeing. And this is a progress update as to what I've been doing so far. I think there's many other things I could do; actually getting permission to survey those in the arrival area of my local airport being one. There's plenty more, but my time is limited, and in a city where the startup scene is fairly new, it's pretty hard to find co-founders, though that would be a MASSIVE help.

Cheers for the post & I hope my thoughts/progress are useful to others. Thanks for reading.

Cheers, this is interesting as I've recently started a travel planning project, incorporating prices of flights, lately. Would love to chat to others who've gained traction, and started making sales in this area.

I'd write down several simple features that the web application will need to do.

Then put them into Trello.

Then prioritise which ones are the most valuable to the business.

Then try and code those first.

Perhaps at this point, try and break that 1st task down into 3 or 4 subtasks.

Write a checklist of every little detail that the pages should have.

As you do even the smallest of things, tick of that element in the checklist.

Ask questions to those that your working for.

Make suggestions for improvement if you notice them, but understand that their maybe genuine business / user reasons for some oddities you'll find.

Also make sure you someone from the business who'se interested in the project. Make them interested if needs be i.e. find out what pain points they experienced with the old app, and have a think about what you can do together to improve that area of functionality.

Together write a regular report to the rest of the business about what's happening, and give a fortnightly update.

I'm glad that both of these companies exist and offer globally competitive hosting, and are both local to myself.

Can either offer a service where you can create a new server setup with a RoR / Db setup from an image though?

I mostly use Heroku until I have users these days, but I do think there's maybe a trick in offering mirroring of the heroku functionality from the cmd line :)

Keep up the great work.

It's fairly straightforward on the Brightbox cloud. You get the server to where you want it and then create a 'snapshot'.

You can then create new servers from that snapshot as required.

Perhaps there's public snapshots that you can start with?