The Viamentis Blog

As it happens, I wondered if I could get to work with jQuery in a previous post. Looks like I turned lucky, and I was contacted recently to work on a javascript-heavy project. Initially we started working with jQuery, but due to the nature of the project, where in jQuery needs to live together with several other js frameworks, and Prototype being one of them, we quickly ran into conflicts.

There are several tricks to make sure jQuery doesn’t conflict with other frameworks, but none of them actually worked satisfactorily. We ended up using YUI instead because one of its’ strong points is a non-conflicting namespace. Another stroke of luck – I have been meaning to work with YUI too, but finally got the chance. A pretty tight deadline meant I had to get up to snuff with a lot of JS concepts that I understood only hazily, and it was great fun working with JS again.

JS is a very powerful language, and it’s very true that it’s a language that wears the syntax of Java, but it’s actually a kind of Lisp. It is very much like functional languages in its’ design, where functions are first class objects, of course with closures etc. Plus, YUI makes it even more fun – it has a complete set of controls which help you build very rich UIs. Also, if you’re interested in JS at all, I recommend reading YUI Blog – a veritable gold mine of JS-related info. A very enlightening blog.

A pretty basic but interesting ruby guide. There are some surprises too. I didn’t know irb has such a cool tab-completion feature. Neat.

Now, this is interesting. I tried jQuery a while back, and have been looking for an excuse to use it in one of our projects. Since Rails is so closely married to Prototype, it’s not so easy having two different js frameworks to maintain. Until now. jRails looks interesting, promises to be a drop-in replacement for Prototype.js. Now things should get exciting.

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!