SubMate's blog!

posted by Clément

Hey! 

I’ve been working at SubMate for a month and a half (ouch! time flies!) and proud to announce my first *significant* release. Amongst the numerous small tasks and updates on the web site and the API (private for the moment), here is a big change coming.

Well… you don’t see anything different? Happy to hear it! Indeed, most of the work isn’t visible. I dealt with authentication, security and data integrity.
This current release is still far from being technically perfect, but it’s a much better foundation to work on. As a background, I suggested the use of an agile methodology (eXtreme Programming), with TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development).I’ve been encouraged early on to work this way, and it was great news! So, we are now almost ready to adopt continuous integration which will allow you to discover cool new features very frequently. 
Here are some technical details:

Your information is stored in a safer manner, all authentication needs are delegated to the Authlogic gem.Indeed, I recommend that library which provides a clear structure for authentication purpose. I tried the Devise gem which seems to be very nice, but for now I’m not very familiar with the deeper abstraction it provides.
100% of the data resources are now restful. This architecture allows a simpler global application design, a simpler code (using conventions). That will allow us to improve speed development and release a rock-solid API.

Data flow and feeds are now super flexible, allowing us to provide you very soon with amazing interactivity and information you are waiting for.

A little word about the platform we use (Heroku): I never saw such a great service. With Heroku, deployment is just one tiny step in the workflow. No disappointment except two downtimes (couple of hours for each) in two months.We may soon use background workers in order to treat long-running tasks (like sending e-mails, storing pics, fetching external API data, …) without blocking your experience on the website.

Received an unpleasant message on SubMate? Check the “report abuse” link soon.

So much to come: stay tuned! It’s time for me to go back working on it!

Posted by Laurent, Co-Founder of SubMate

At SubMate, we’re blessed with a super cool team of engineers. We got Clément, a killer ruby on rails developer who joined the team last month, and Kevin, a ninja iPhone hacker who joined last week. Both are ultra motivated by our project, and don’t count hours.

Fresh airAs business guys, Jonathan and myself know how frustrating it can be to work on the very same issue for a few days in a row.The same goes for any engineer, working on complex problems to solve. Spending days, weeks, on similar items can be exhausting, and make you loose interest, motivation on the long term.It’s great to get some fresh air, test new technologies, get your hands on that new cool framework everyone is buzzing about. Those might not be adapted to your main project. For instance, Rails3 is not stable yet for mainstream release), but the challenge to master it is super-motivating for a tech guy hacking on rails. MongoDB is hot right now, and we wanna test it before further deployment.

[Click here to continue reading on Laurent’s Blog]

We are glad to announce that SubMate’s team just welcomed a new member: Kevin!

Kevin will be in charge of SubMate’s iPhone app. We actually have a very cool iPhone app thanks to “I See U“ but SubMate is gonna evolve sooooo awesomely fast in the next months that we wanted to have a dev inside the team so that the app can stay up to speed! That will be Kevin’s mission.

We hope that Kevin will post time to time on that blog his thoughts about the dev of the app, to share his knowledge and the process.

As always it’s awesome for us to see the team grow and we hope to welcome a new RoR dev pretty soon (if you are one and you’re looking for a job in a cool new startup shoot us a mail ninja_at_submate.com)

Stay tuned for our next adventures :)

P.S: If you have an Android or a WebOS phone we’re not forgetting you, and we’re working on it :)

A new version of our iPhone App just hit the app store! We fixed some bugs with the help of I SEE U . So download it and tell us what you think of it :)

To have quick updates about SubMate follow us on Twitter or Facebook :)

by occhiovivo

SubMate is in constant evolution, we currently add at least one feature a day. But most of the recents changes didnt impact the frontend of the website, what you see, but the backend.

So yeah, most of the work is done behind the scene. To give you a few examples of what we did during the last week:

• improved the authentification process
• improved the security of your informations
• pushed a new backoffice to manage users
• added cool new features to our API (currently private, but a private beta will come soon)
• RESTful architecture was implemented
• and of course fixed some bugs
• …

We also improved some things on the frontend, like the fact that you can now reset your password and the pagination in user’s home page so that now you can discover even more people in your areas !!

Long story short : WE ARE WORKING OUR ASSES OFF to deliver you the best product possible !

The work done behind the scene is as important as (and sometime more than) the work done on the user end it allow us to deliver a stable and secure product.

If you are interested in the “behind the scene work” I invite you if you live in Paris to come this saturday at La Cantine to hear Clement, our super dev, talk about Heroku/Submate at WebWorkerCamps

We have a new team member at SubMate:  Clément ! He is (for the moment) our intern, he will work on the tech site of SubMate. Basically, every new feature that you gonna see popup in the next few days/months on Submate will have his touch !

I recommand you to follow Clément on twitter  ! He will blog here from time to time, to talk about some technical issues and challenges that he will solve but also what he has learned !

So once again, welcome Clément!

Great great day for SubMate ! After an amazing presentation by Laurent, SubMate has been designated the winner of Startup 2.0 :)

Oh and by the way, we launched SubMate in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia for the occasion !

We told you to stay tuned ;)

(if you are a journalist or a blogger and you are looking for info about SubMate you can find the PR of our launch here: http://submate.pressdoc.com/1901-submate-launches-its-public-beta-at-the-next-web)

Startup2.0 is a competition of European social networking sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups (either created or willing to do so in the future) that work in the field.

The competition is happening in Bilbao during the Nonick Conference ! And we are proud to announce that SubMate has been selected as one of the finalists !!!

Laurent is actually in Bilbao to present SubMate at Startup 2.0 in front of a great audience.

We are gonna use that tremendous opportunity to announce exciting news for SubMate during our presentation! So stay tuned, follow us on twitter to know everything about this !!

Anonymous asked: I want to delete my account. How do I do that?

Hi,

Soon there will be a feature so you can delete your profile but in the meantime you can send us a mail with your login and we will delete for you: admin_at_submate.com .

We will appreciate if you can join to your email some feedback on why you want to delete your account so we can improve Submate :/

Another big week for SubMate with 2 important news:

1. SubMate’s iPhone app is available!
2. Hong-Kong’s MTR network is now integrated in SubMate!

I know that a lot of you where waiting for SubMate’s iPhone app, you can download it from the App Store for FREE! We made the app available in all App Store even if we not cover your country for the moment.

It’s a first version, and yeah we plan to make it more beautiful and faster very soon. Give it a try, and give us some feedback :)

The second big news is the integration of Hong Kong in SubMate ! It’s our first Asian city :) The buzz has been amazing for a few day there so we felt that we have to add Hong Kong to thank everybody. So far so good, a big part of our audience is from Hong Kong now !

If you want that we add your city, you can suggest it to us: here. Hong Kong was in top position when we decided to add it. So as you can see we really want to please you :)

Lots of amazing features and news are coming this week for SubMate so stay tuned !