@Rails - I haven’t started that long ago, so consider me a novice For practice - and because I think it’s of great personal benefit to me - I’m developing an app to help train my vocabulary.
@Ryan - I’ll check out your site tomorrow. Neil speaks very highly of you, so I’m sure there will be stuff that’ll be of use to my project(s). Thanks for your offer btw!

@TheWineGod - Cool! Michael Pollan’s book ‘In Defense of Food’ http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php has convinced me I should drink more alcohol on weekdays, preferably red wine. But it’s a bit annoying as a starting wine drinker to know which wines go with what dishes/ingredients, so this app sounds especially nice for a starter like me Put me on the beta-user list!

@Peter yes, I am actually working on a screencast for Neil right now, on how to make a polymorphic permissions system for use in a social app. If you have any questions or problems please don’t hesitate to ask me, I’ll do my best to help with anything. How long have you been using Rails for? Or have you just started?

With regards the social e-commerce engine, basically the case study is a website called TheWineGod, which is going to be one of my boss’s companies.

The idea is that when you buy wine, usually it tells you roughly what it’s good with e.g. ‘fish’, or ‘meat’, but rarely the actual details. When you buy a wine you might discover it goes well with a particular dish or ingredient, so the idea behind the site is you can ask people who’ve bought the bottle you’re looking at ‘Do you think it would go well with… X Y Z?’, they can then reply and earn points if the person buys it and likes it.

A user will be able to do things like setup their own Wine cellar so they can show the wines they like and list their reviews, again earning points when people buy from their cellar and like what they buy.

The points will lead to coupons, money off etc - like having a loyalty card at a supermarket. Aside from that, I am up for suggestions on how to increase interaction between users.

I’d love to visit Amsterdam, especially with people who know the city, all my housemates say it’s a beautiful place, so if you guys would be happy with me tagging along and if I can get time off work, I’d certainly take you guys up on the offer of meeting up.