ProgrammingBooks.org is a great resource for any developer/programmer looking for the best of breed books on a particular coding area. All the books are user ranked, kind of like a highly targeted Digg, minus much of the social networking elements. The simple act of adding a book as one of your favorites increases it’s ranking. Users can comment on any book in the system, not just ones they mark as their favorites.

Like most programmers, Shane had read many programming books over the years. ProgrammingBooks.org grew as a result of a blog post about his favorites.

I’ve read a lot of programming related books over the years and I’ve always thought about writing an article on my blog about the books I thought helped me the most. I finally wrote it and the response was amazing. The article made the front page of digg and del.icio.us, and got roughly 50,000 readers in the first 24 hours. I noticed that a lot of people disagreed with my choices and had very strong opinions on various other books. I started thinking about a way to allow everyone to pick their top 5 programming books and programmingbooks.org came out of that.

Shane built the entire site in about a month using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. The user interface takes advantage of Yahoo! UI Framework. The design of the site is sparse, yet clean and efficient. As more of a developer then a designer, Shane struggled with the look of the site, especially the logo. This is certainly an area I can relate to, but with a site targeting programmers, under design can have it’s advantages.

Shane attended college at Texas A&M, but fell just short of graduating (the second developer since I’ve started this site who didn’t finish college). He currently work at Frog Design.

As of Jan 21st ProgrammingBooks has 193 registered users, who have ranked 613 books. The process of ranking a book is dead simple. First you select the category of the book. The users is then presented with five text fields where they can enter the title of the book. If the book is in the system the field will auto complete. Books that aren’t in the system must be added through a separate form before they can be ranked.

ProgrammingBooks.org is a great starting point when looking for the consensus best programming book in a particular area.

Popularity: 16% [?]

16bugs is a hosted bug tracking solution developed by Michele Finotto. The app has both free and paid versions and uses PayPal for payment. 16bugs has all the AJAX, RSS and javascript effects you would expect from a Web 2.0 app.

Before I did any actual Googling I was under the impression that there were numerous hosted bug tracking sites. The first site that came to mind was Basecamp, the hugely popular project collaboration and management app. But it turns out they don’t actually have a specific bug tracking module. This appears to be intentional, to some degree, so as not to restrict there market to only software development.

In fact after doing some Googling I was surprised how few players there were in the hosted bug tracking arena. And the ones that were out there seemed decidedly weak and dated (aka not Web 2.0 (aka no AJAX)).

Michele felt the same way:

I’m a developer and as any developers I needed to track bugs in my
code, but available solutions weren’t good enough for me, so I decided
to roll my own bug tracker.

16 bugs was started in March of 2006 and took about two months to release the initial version, although new features are being added constantly. The app was built using Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database. Users can upload attachments with their bug reports, which are stored using Amazon’s S3 (Simple, Storage Service).

One of the coolest features is the ability to create dynamic 16bugs subdomains. For example I made a test company for this blog. You can even style your subdomain, although the options were limited to a list of the color scheme and uploading your logo.

This opens up an interesting area - social bug tracking. Many open source projects already do something like this, where users can post bugs. I have yet to see this same style approach taken to web sites. Some sites have forums where users can post issues, but it would be cool if more sites/companies tried this open approach. Obviously some bugs would have to be kept private, such as “admin/admin is a hard coded login that will allow full access to the site”. For now 16bugs only allows open viewing of bugs (configurable of course), not posting, but I think that would be an interesting direction for this app to take.

Michele seems to have found a not so small niche and has positioned 16bugs to fill that need. The app has all the basics you would expect from a bug tracking solution, giving in the framework to grow into something truly unique and special.

Popularity: 15% [?]

There certainly isn’t a lack of web-based time tracking apps right now. I’ve used SlimTimer in the past, but Tick, BaseCamp and Harvest are all major players, to name a few. Despite the number of options available, Myles Eftos couldn’t find one that fit his needs. Myles motivations for starting 88 Miles were twofold.

1) I needed a decent reason to use Rails seriously, and
2) I was in desperate need for a really simple time tracking system

Myles was looking for something simple and with 88 Miles he’s achieved that. The application is easy to pick up - I didn’t even check out the help section once. 88 Miles is great for single developlers, but also has features for tracking multiple users over the same projects.

88 Miles is free if you tracking under 40 hours a month and offers for pay plans if you need to track more time. There is also a mobile edition, which I didn’t get a chance to try, but is a nice touch. Also of interested to developers is the open API.

Myles works full-time for Bam Creative as a development team leader. In the 5 months he has been working on this projects he figures he’s put in 250 hours. In addtion to the 88 Miles blog, Myles also has a personal blog, which I highly recommened for any web developers.

As a final note, I would like to compliment Myles on his design skills. Although is admittly more of a coder then a designer, I’m impressed with the look of both 88 Miles and his blog.

Thanks to Myles for submitting his app. I encourage anyone looking for a simple time tracking system to check out 88 Miles.

Popularity: 28% [?]