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!

Yesterday, I was at the PipesCamp organized by one of the little startups we share our office with, hover.in. They had actually requested me to give a talk, but things were so hectic over the weekend that I had practically no time to prepare, so I had to excuse myself.

But I was able to make to the event itself, if only as part of the audience. And it was loads of fun. The day started off with Bosky, the CTO of hover.in introducing Yahoo Pipes, it’s potential, and why it is a new paradigm worth watching. He then invited Prabhu, who then took the stage and showed us how you could do interesting stuff with Pipes and the iPhone. And then there was a panel on how Yahoo Pipes could be useful for the day-to-day work of a blogger, and they dragged me onstage, as they needed a developer’s perspective too.

For a question regarding what we thought Yahoo Pipes’ drawbacks, or why they aren’t as popular as they can be, I said I think that’s because it is very much a geek tool. Most of the bloggers are tech-savvy, but they couldn’t possibly expected to create something with Pipes, as it still feels like a light-weight IDE to me. I think something truly user-friendly, like a drag-and drop interface, regardless of the format of the sources, would help the adoption better.

And then there was a nice lunch, and people were encouraged to break off into teams and hack up their pipes, which was quite a bit of fun. I was about to start on my own, but  Moyeen seemed to be really keen on working on one too, but he didn’t have his lappie along with him, so I offered mine. Then I took a book and dozed off, only to be woken up for the demos. There were quite a few nice demos, which you can see on the PipesCamp page. There was also this very nice talk about Mashups and Monetization by Narain of Equvia. It is always a nice to catch up with him. All in all, a very nice, well-put together event.

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.

 If you are in India and are interested in free and open source software, you must have heard about Foss.in. It is, arguably, India’s biggest open source conference. I have had a long association with them, and I have been attending it since 2003 edition. Now that Divya has joined me, and Unni will also be joining us in a few days, I thought it would be nice to take them both to Foss.in.

It was the first real conference I have attended after I joined my first job, and it made a great impression on me. I hope it provides the same inspiration to the new folks joining me at Viamentis. Open source software forms an important part of our day-to-day work, and we are grateful to be able to work with such great technology.

If you want to meet us or just hang around with us, you are most welcome. Just send me a mail (refer to the contact page) beforehand. By the way, we will be there for the main conference. Unfortunately we are going to have to skip the Project Days, though all of them look quite interesting.

Also, I won’t be speaking at the conference this year, though I had great fun speaking the last two years. The change of focus this time to having only speakers who actively contribute means that it percludes me. Though I do contribute now and then, I can’t really say I’m a major contributor to any open source project.

No excuses, I’ll try to remedy that next time around. Unni is very keen on contributing to some open source projects, so hopefully he’ll be able to speak next year. It would be a proud moment for us