Weaponry

We are working exclucsively on macs, using TextMate for development, Balsamiq mockups / Inkscape / Skitch for graphics stuff.

Besides Rails (the obvious choice for bigger web-apps) we really like Sinatra too. We prefer haml/sass, jQuery, RSpec+Cucumber+Webrat, Datamapper / ActiveRecord on and off Rails. Passenger for deployment, git for source control (our code lives at github.com), though I guess that's just stating the obvious. Hosting our stuff on brightbox (heavier Rails apps) and dreamhost (everything else).

We are not scared of Javascript either - we heavily prefer jQuery, and we are OK with pure, hand-sliced Javascript/DOM scripting as well. We have quite some experience developing Firefox extensions too.

Last but not least, we think Ruby is the best thing since sliced bread - pure Ruby development is one of our core strengths as well.

Project Sampler

Please check out the sampler of our client work so far:

homeflow.co.uk
Implementing a large-scale web scraping scenario involving 2500 scrapers running on amazon EC2. GUI to enable lightning fast creation of scrapers by non-technical crew. Orchestration and scaling issues.

zoopla.co.uk
Zoopla!, UK's most promising internet company in 2008, partnered up with Homeflow to steer the development of the scRUBYt! GUI. Besides the implementation we are negotiating with them to set up and manage a small off-shore team of scraper developers and level 1 support.
Tools / Frameworks
Rails, Ruby, scRUBYt!, Javascript, Screw.Unit, XUL (Firefox extension), Nanite, Amazon APIs and tools
snapmylife.com
Instantly share and view photos on your mobile phone. Rails contracting, various tasks revolving around incoming mms processing, managing the photos (especially tagging functionality) etc.
Tools / Frameworks
Fairly standard Rails stack; mms2r, geocoder, exifr, acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
measuredfitness.com
Measuredfitness is a Silicon Valley based startup in the fitness sector. We helped them to populate their initial database by scraping tens of thousands of nutrition-related records.
Tools / Frameworks
Ruby, scRUBYt!
holmeslabs.com - business card app
A smaller Rails app - sending out your business card as an SMS response. Handling incoming / outgoing SMSes and managing users subscribed to various keywords. Very early version as of now, so no dedicated homepage yet.
Tools / Frameworks
Rails, Haml/Sass, ActiveRecord, RSpec+Cucumber, jQuery, Google Charts, SaaS RailsKit
markethero.com
A Rails startup simulating day trading mechanisms - we built the application from scratch, starting from the first sketches all the way to the alpha version, managing all aspects of development as a CTO/lead coder.
Tools / Frameworks
Ruby, Rails, ActiveRecord, Ar-extensions, Test::Unit, Prototype, Amcharts, Background Job, scRUBYt!, Engine Yard :-)
mobicious.com
Our very first serious scraping gig with scRUBYt! - delivered tens of thousands of records from various sites, including all assets and details, forming the base of mobicious.com's data after launching.
Tools / Frameworks
Ruby, scRUBYt!, FireWatir, ActiveRecord, MySQL, Hpricot