The Viamentis 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!

I have been observing the developments in the RoR world with quite some interest lately. I think there are a few very significant improvements – the most important being the availability of mod_rails. The installation and setup is almost a no-brainer. I still remember the amount of pain it took to get Rails up and running in Apache2. And all the varying combinations of “best setups” offered – Apache (1.3), Lighttpd, LiteSpeed, Nginx, and finally, we’re back to Apache2. It’s about time. I think this will give a big boost to Rails adoption.  I really like that I can run multiple Rails apps on a single server with just a vhost setup, instead of mucking around with mod_proxy.

Next, I’ve been reading about Slicehost quite a bit, and I thought I should give it a shot. So we setup our staging server there, just to give it a shot. I ended up being very impressed – especially, I really like articles.slicehost.com – amazingly detailed and clear-cut source for setting up Rails apps on Slicehost. And pretty up-to-date too. I just finished setting up a Rails app on a Hardy Heron slice with the site’s help. I still remember the hoops we had to jump through to get the ‘perfect setup’ done on a vps. Really, the kids have it so easy these days.