The Viamentis Blog

After a rather long absence from writing anything here, I’m back. There is only so long I can hold back from yammering about one cool thing or the other that I see, inspite of the hectic schedule.The last one year has been a great adventure. Some of you have followed it here, and I’m thankful to you. See the number of subscribers to this blog and I wonder who it could be. I hope you’re getting some value out of it. I can only say things will be getting better.

As some of you know, Viamentis started a life of it’s own last year around this time. Previously, it was just me hacking away nurturing dreams of building this company, and hiring more developers who are as much in love with the web as I am. And I did that. I got to work with two really talented ones, and it has been a great ride. Unfortunately, the ride did not last long. Of course, I have myself to blame. I underestimated what it takes to actually run a web development services company.

Though I loved every minute of creating something of my own, but it meant that I was moving away and away from the things that I really loved – writing code, exploring new technologies. Still, I did not really regret it, because Unni and Divya were really enthusiastic about checking out new stuff and blogging about them here. I knew that there would be some administrative overhead that I would have to handle.

In the end, it was down to every startup’s curse – burning cash too fast – that did us in. I had to let both of them go, because, let’s face it, Viamentis is fully boot-strapped, out of my pocket. I really hated letting them go. But I guess we all have to start somewhere, and it was a great lesson to me. Though it has been very difficult, I would not miss the experience for anything. It’s absolutely true that you don’t actually know something until you start doing it. I learned a lot more about running a business by doing it for six months than I did in years of reading business books.

So, here we are, back to Viamentis being a single-person company again. Of course, that means my schedule is a lot more hectic – luckily, most of the clients that I picked up stuck with me, and I’m grateful to them. But I think there is an upside after all – now I realize why I have to find a good partner – there is no way I can handle everything in a business like this. Also, being on my own again means that there will be a little bit of free time -  so I can go back to tech stuff that never had time for checking out.

There are a couple of new languages that I’m dying to check out. Also, the mobile arena is really getting interesting – with iPhone SDK and Android. Though I always loved the iPhone, for now I’m more leaned towards Android, mostly because it uses a language I know (Java) and uses a toolset that is very familiar to me (Eclipse). Also, the emulator was pretty neat – I got a taste of what G-1 would look like, right on my desktop. I would still like to check out a bit of iPhone SDK too, but that would mean I have to change a lot of my development environment – the biggest one being getting a Mac. Now, that would take a bit more time. With Android, I can just start right away on my beloved Ubuntu box. More on this later.

If you made it this long, thanks! Hang on, there is a lot of interesting stuff coming up!

Oh, this breaks my heart. I’ve always loved Google, and I would readily admit that I envy the awesome company they have built. But sometimes, you see little signs that the company, is no longer radically “not evil” or iconoclastic like before. Perhaps it is only to be expected, now that thousands and thousands of people work for them, and some amount of “regular big co” attitude will creep in.

But you see little things like Google keeping track of your search history, even after you logged off from one of their services (check the top right corner the next time you do a google search). That worries me. They have no business to track my search history.  And little puff pieces in the press like these. That press release sounds too flattering to me. Something just doesn’t sound right.

We’re watching you, Google. Here’s hoping you’ll keep inspiring us and stay “not evil”

I’m pretty impressed with Amazon these days – specifically about the web services they are offering. We are very lucky to get an opportunity to work with Amazon Webservices for one of our clients, and I always thought Amazon S3 and EC2 are amazing tools.

Now, they have followed that up with SimpleDB, which seems even more innovative and game-changing. In creating this service, Amazon seems to attempt to turn the traditional database paradigm on its’ head. Apart from being a web service, accessible through an API, there are many things quite special about SimpleDB: ‘Domains’, which are conceptually similar to database tables, can contain ‘Items’ which are similar to rows, and each of those items contain several ‘Attributes’, which are similar to columns.

The attribute values are stored in ‘Cells’, similar to database fields. However, these cells unlike traditional databases, can hold multiple values. You can have as many or as few attributes for each item. That is, each row/item need not contain a fixed number of columns/attributes. Each item to its’ own. Seemingly, they are indexed automatically. Even better, there is no such thing as a database schema. You can add whatever type of information you want in each cell.

Amazon seemingly created a simple query language to create and retrieve data. My first reaction was that it would be better if it created an sql-like language, but the SimpleDB query language seems to be much simpler than SQL – so why complicate our lives? After going through the developer docs, I am a little disappointed that there isn’t a Ruby interface to SimpleDB as yet. I’m pretty sure it won’t take too long before someone comes up with that very soon.

My only doubt would be how much lag is there going to be to retrieve and send data to this web service? At the end of the day, a database run by us on the same machine as the web server or a nearby server is going to be pretty fast to access. Can Amazon SimpleDB match that? Of course, we would only know that once we try it out. We should know very soon.

What is surprising is that Google or Yahoo is not competing in this space. Probably only developers and startups care about this right now, but with some polish, AWS can become enterprise-ready, and Amazon might end up becoming the company that becomes the IT infrastructure supplier for businesses very soon. That is a bit surprising, because Amazon, at the end of the day, is an online retailer. So how does this fit into their business strategy? So they want to sell IT infrastructure along with books, toys and electronics? That is a bit strange, because AWS seems to be the only thing that Amazon sells which is enterprise-oriented.

Finally, I don’t think it is Facebook which is the new “that” company to work for, which has the coolest problems for the developers to be solved and has a great future (I still think it is in many ways still Google) it just might be, surprisingly, good ole Amazon. Right on. It will be well deserved.

There seems to be a lot of attention being paid to Google’s answer to the Facebook Platform called OpenSocial. I heard about it on Pmarca’s blog, but there are a lot of details here, here, here and here.

I think this attention is truly deserved, because it really opens up the field for innovative widgets/apps which run on these platforms. The major Facebook Platform app developers are also participating, which portends well for the adoption. Stay tuned for more observations, as I feel this is an exciting new opportunity where there will be a lot of action in the future.