At the last Raleigh Ruby Brigade meetup, Adam Williams & John Long presented the work they've been collaborating on called Broadsword.

Full Disclosure: I have spent some time in the basement with Adam and John working with Broadsword, so I might be just a little biased.

So, what is Broadsword? In a sentence - it's Quickbooks, taken to the web, for freelancers. Very specific niche market.

The first thing Adam & John talked about was their inspiration for creating Broadsword. They started off referencing the book "Wild at Heart", by John Eldredge. Some of the points they took away from this book were that they felt "it was time to break free from the cage of working for others" (and which of us developers hasn't felt that at some point), and "God has given us the desire to build something."

They referenced Robert Kiyoski's Cashflow Quadrant - and talked about moving from the Employed side of the graph to the business owner/investor side. This is a point I think some freelancers miss. Even when you are "self-employed," you are still employed. It isn't until you become a business owner, or an investor that can really stop being employed. Which brings me to their next point - they also want to enable people to make the same move from the employed side of the graph.

Adam & John talked about their process. Which is very much influence by such things as Agile development (a personal favorite of mine) and Getting Real (another personal favorite of mine). It appears to me they are using a modified Extreme Programming process that is optimized for two people. One thing they are able to use to their advantage is that they are both experienced programmers; and adding to that John is also an accomplished designer. Their basic process is to brainstorm what feature needs to be added; John mocks it up and produces an HTML prototype, and then hands it off to Adam for implementation. All the while, the two are communicating, so it's not "tossing it over the wall" at any point.

Finally they covered some of the tools they use in their development.

• serve - Rapid Prototyping
• Scenarios - Fixtures are dead
• RSpec - Better Testing
• spec_integration plugin
• spec_goodies plugin

Broadsword looks like a great app, looking forward to when we can finally start using it!

As a note, the December Raleigh Ruby Brigade will be merging with the Trilug December Social. This will be a great event to meet other people outside of the Ruby world, and get some great Google swag at the same time!