So this is kinda sad, but I signed up for Twitter a week ago. Alicia's been nudging me for a while, but I've just now gotten around to it. That's about the same time that Kottke did, so it's not like I'm that far behind. But here's the sad part: it's been a week and I haven't thought a single interesting thing to twitter (twit? tweet?) about. I'm clearly not in the right mindset. Maybe going to a geek conference with a bunch of other tech-savvy folk will spur some interest.
I really like Dodgeball, but remain frustrated by it's failure to achieve of critical mass. I see how Twitter could be cooler in that it is more flexible and is being bent into uses the creators didn't even imagine. But Twitter has yet to prove that it can expand beyond the exact same set of people who were already using Dodgeball, which in my case was only a handful of friends. Anyway, the jury is still out, but I'd feel better about the whole thing if I found an occasion to actually say something.
Just a heads up that I and some of my Atlassian colleagues will be at the Under the Radar conference this Friday in Mountain View. Atlassian is a member of the Graduate Circle and Troy Angrigon, one of our customers, will be presenting short case-study on using Confluence.
It looks to be an interesting Conference, hopefully one with more substance than Office 2.0 last fall. I'm looking forward to it. If you see me wandering around, be sure to say hi.
Yes, I know I've been silent on the blog for the last three months. Unfortunately, this post isn't really going to remedy that situation.
However I did want to point out that Atlassian is inviting folks over to our office this Thursday evening to drink some beer, chat with our developers, and hear about one of our new products, Bamboo (only if you want).
So, if you'd like to catch up, or to find out more about us, please, drop by! Details are here.
"If you want an iPhone, you are going to get the luxury of being on the Cingular network."
– Cingular president of national distribution Glenn Lurie, in this PC Magazine article (you should read the whole thing).
When I read this quote, I can't help but picture a mob boss staring across a table in a dimly lit room, explaining to me the details of the offer I won't be able to refuse.
An interesting, if somewhat vague, post on the Open Company idea from Jive Software: http://jivesoftware.com/blog/2006/12/12/the-open-organization/. What does all that theorizing mean for Clearspace? Or for Jive?
Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquhar won the overall category in Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year competition last night in Sydney! Here are two segments from an Australian Business news show about the award.
- The award presentation.
- Ali Moore speaks with Michael Cannon-Brookes [mp4] [wmv]
- A look at award winning company Atlassian [mp4] [wmv]
Congrats!
Just a quick note to mention that Atlassian is hiring one Java developer for the San Francisco office — our first here. It's an interesting position with responsibilities that extend beyond those of a regular programmer. If you're interested, please drop me a line.
My partners and I have been working on WishRadar in our spare hours for quite a while. For most of that time, we were doing development and testing on an inexpensive hosted server from one of the many, identical hosting providers out there. David knew enough about systems administration (having been drafted into that roll too many times now) to get us up and running with the standard set of development tools and to prepare a testing environment to which we could deploy. That's what we used for our friends-and-family beta period.
But as we started to prepare for launching WishRadar to a larger number of people, we were quickly frustrated by the whole "deploying Rails in production" problem. We're Java developers by training, and all of our production experience, thus far, has been in that realm. Moreover, production deployment of a Rails app is still a relatively new field. There's very not a surfeit of information available about servers, tools, best practices or performance tuning. (I'm not saying these goals can't be achieved with Rails, I'm just saying it was hard to find a whole lot of how-tos.) We were learning everything as we went, and it was slow. Every hour we spent on a sysadmin task was an hour that we weren't coding. And it was starting to chafe.
On the other hand, during work hours I had the pleasure of working with Contegix, who host all of Atlassian's servers. The difference couldn't have been more stark. There has never been a question we've asked that Contegix haven't been able to answer, usually in five minutes or less. They're like having a full-time sysadmin on staff who knows everything about your systems, who never goes to sleep, and who always seems chipper at the thought of making any change you might need — no matter the hour of the night. So I decided to find out if Contegix could do the same for a Rails app.
I contacted Matthew Porter at Contegix, and it turned out that they have been doing quite a bit of Rails hosting. Matthew was incredibly patient with our many questions and ever-changing configuration plans. He helped us decide what kind of hardware we needed, what software infrastructure to choose, what database to use and how to set it up. He offered us a quote which, while more than the hosting we were using at the time, was just within our budget. It felt like a reach at the time. We thought hard about it. But now, a few months later, we feel like we got an incredible bargain.
From the moment we said go, they had our hardware up and running in two days. Over the following two days, they worked with us to set up apache, mongrel, postgres, email, monitoring and backups — all without us touching a single command line. As we first deployed WishRadar to our new server, they stood by us and helped us tune the app and the database until it could support our initial influx of users. And in the weeks we've been running, they haven't let up: emails are turned around immediately. They have answers to every question. They monitor the server and warn us about problems, and often correct them without needing us to intervene.
Bottom line: Contegix know their stuff. They're unbelievably responsive. And they're worth ten times the amount of money we're paying. I feel confident in saying that without their help, we still wouldn't have WishRadar launched. If you're searching for hosting for your Rails app, you couldn't do better than Contegix.
I'm about a week late in mentioning this, but we managed to add a useful new feature to WishRadar. In addition to Amazon, we now poll Half.com for item prices. If the Half.com price is cheaper than Amazon's (as it seems to be quite often), WishRadar notify you of that. When you click on the 'Buy' button, we'll take you to the site with the cheapest price. Also, any email/sms query will return the best price from all sources. I've already gotten a couple of good deals from Half.com.
Thanks to everyone who has signed up already. We plan to keep making things better — more stores are on the way. And we'd really appreciate it if you can help us spread the word. Christmas is coming up, and what better way to let people know what you want than showing them your wishlist!
If you haven't signed up for WishRadar yet, now there's even more reason to do so. More stuff, even for even less cash. So no excuses — go sign up. As for me, I'm off to fix some bugs.
Here is a little detail from the JotSpot acquisition that I had not yet heard (thanks Zoli):
According to Phil Wilson (a participant in the JotSpot Server* beta), Jot has announced that they're discontinuing their beta program. Now, this does not necessarily mean that they're completely abandoning the on-premise version. After all, they're moving their software onto the Google infrastructure, which will no doubt mean significant changes. And so continuing to work on a potentially incompatible installed version would be wasted effort. So discontinuing the current beta makes sense either way.
But this does mean that if Jot is going to offer on-permise software again, it's going to be on Google's technology and on Google's time-table. Of course, Google's engineering prowess is formidable and we should not underestimate their ability. But installed, enterprise software does not seem to be an immediate priority for Google. Which means the rest of the wiki vendors have a longer lead time before Google's possible re-entry into this end of the market — something we should be prepared for, whether it ever happens or not.
* That was their VMWare-based, locally installed version.
Jonathan Nolen 