Welcome, one and allForums

Hi all !

This is the new XLSuite discussion forum. From here, we’ll be keeping detailed discussions of all development tracks.

I think we should begin by introducing ourselves, so we all know each other better after that.

You can find my face right here: http://rubyurl.com/VTB

I’m thirtyish and live in Sherbrooke, QC, Canada: http://rubyurl.com/F90

I have been coding since I was 11 year old. Lord, already twenty years… Sheesh. I’m getting really old :)

I found Ruby on Rails in late 2004, and started my business in early 2005. Since then, I have coded many applications, the biggest of which you’re looking at right now.

I have good experience with Quebec accounting systems, as that was my last job, before opening for business. I have also worked on payroll systems.

Go ahead and introduce yourselves. I’m curious to see who we all are.

Have a nice day ! François

Hello, my name is Riel and I am a codeaholic. There's always been something about "rolling your own" that appealed to me more than simply using what's available. Yeah, there are other systems out there, yeah, we could have used some open source PHP project to do this with, yeah, we could have saved a lot of time and trouble and headache if we'd just lifted "vTiger's":http://www.vtiger.com/ codebase or some other CRM... but, then would that have been any fun? When Francois introduced me to "Ruby on Rails":http://rubyonrails.org and the "Scriptaculous":http://script.aculo.us/ library of tricks, I was hooked. You could see right away how this was different, this was exciting, this was something that was unique. I've built companies based on software systems before - while those were exciting - distributing the executable model and the challenges of upgrading your users while functioning on a variety of platforms was daunting. A much more attractive option was adding a new feature to a web application and having it immediately update thousands of users' sites simultaneously. So here we are, nearing the end of "round 1" and I'm pretty excited about the team we've assembled and the product that we're developing. Who am I? !http://djriel.com/riel/cooldaddy80.jpg!A few details, I was born in 1969 (Ya! baby!) I'm married to the "coolest entertainment lawyer on the planet":http://www.fmc-law.com/scripts/index_.asp?action=31&E_ID=624&P_ID=303&N_ID=2&PT_ID=38&U_ID=0&OP_ID=2 I have two kids "Orion":http://orionpeace.com and "Natasha":http://natashafree.com . I have several other online businesses, including "undernet.*: canada's VoIP alternative":http://undernet.ca, "We Put Up Lights":http://www.weputuplights.com and I'm now embarking on the most ambitious project to date "XLsuite":http://xlsuite.org . If you'd like to see some of my pictures you can look at "my flickr folder":http://flickr.com/photos/riel/. My CV is located on "linked:in":http://www.linkedin.com/ which I've bounced to from my name/domain "riel.roussopoulos.net":http://riel.roussopoulos.net (neat eh?) and that's about it for me. Feel free to ask me anything, as you can tell I'm a pretty chatty guy, you can reach me "here":http://www.djriel.com/modules/contact/index.php amongst "other places":http://www.smrty.com/contact

Bleh, bio time…

I’m Michael, and I’m the interface designer. My background in digital design spans desktop publishing on a Mac Plus (brand new) right through to designing databases for both desktop applications and intranets based on ASP /SQL or CDML /Filemaker Pro code sets, recently.

Riel approached me with his dream of a comprehensive online database solution last summer and once I had a chance to witness what Francois could do with Ajax and advanced Javascript (and later reinforced by a seminar I saw performed by Nathaniel Brown from inimit) I knew this was the right place to bring my dream of a desktop-style application front-end based completely on browser technology.

And, that’s what I ‘d like everyone to think of XLsuite as – an application – not a website. Our goal that is a product that performs as smoothly and seamlessly as a desktop application with an interface that is 100% web-based.

It’s been challenging, but some crazy things have already been worked out by Francois and our CSS guru James Stubbs. So here we go…

Hmmm, lets see. I’m Vince and I have been developing software since I was 13 (which makes it over (gasp am I that old?) 25 years).

I have had an ecclectic career, including games, online gaming, banking and finance, Gas and Oil, set top boxes and embedded systems, and even a p2p music sharing company.

I have written software for a lot of different machines/os’s (Amiga, Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, PalmOS, BeOS) and a number of different languages over the years (BASIC, C, arexx, Java, python and now Ruby).

I have been contracting since early 2006 as a means of bootstrapping my company and to fund development of my current projects, my personal finance site and the file sharing tool. My software development company is HireBrains (which has a nice double meaning) and my (somewhat boring and static) personal site is imbas

I have contributed to open source packages in the past (gtksu patches for the gnome deskop and a very minor patch to the typo blogging engine) and ran my own project for a few years gShieldConf I am looking forward to what I can bring to the project and am excited about the possibilites of tying the pennyminder expense tracking into the xlsuite in some way down the road.