Posts from — January 2009

We love developing web applications today, as opposed to say…2001.  This isn’t because the financial state of the tech environment is better now than it was in 2001, or that Natty and I had just graduated from high school in 2001.  It’s primarily because the tools and frameworks available to web developers are just better now.

Gone are the days when you needed an expensive development environment or three programmers with a black belt in Unix and server architecture to run your site.  Instead open source frameworks and hosting services in the cloud make it extremely easy to design and deploy all with an incredibly lean team of designers and programmers.

Web application development is now in its golden era.

Natty and I consider ourselves to be incredibly fortunate that we began working on Everlater right when this golden era came into fruition.  While we are still designing our final architecture, here’s a rundown of the different tools that Natty, Ryan, Charlie and I have used to develop our site:

• Github.  $7/month.  Hands down the best code repository mixed with the best way to socially tackle coding.  Freakin’ Awesome. (And a prime example of what a bootstrapping company of four can do with this exact infrastructure).
• Ruby on Rails. Free.  Super simple web framework — I knew zero about rails and in four months I can develop rich internet applications — I think that says it all…
• RabbitMQ.  Free.  Messaging queue written in Erlang — used by my former employer for their global messaging queue, so I feel good about using it for our backend infrastructure.
• Apache/Mongrel. Free.  This may change shortly to Passenger, but using Capistrano to deploy to our staging server is about the most satisfyingly easy task in the world.
• Joyent hosting.  Free.  Free developer slices for facebook developers — doesn’t get much better than that!
• SQL.  Free.  We use MySQL/SQLite/Postgres in development and PostgreSQL on our staging server currently, but that may change to….
• CouchDB.  Free.  This is going to be awesome — super excited about deploying it across our site in the coming weeks!

So…there we have it — $7/month and our time.  Plus, this software is ridiculously easy to use (and learn for Natty and I).  Moral of the story is that there’s no need to raise a half-a-million dollar seed round to build the next Facebook/Google/whatever, you can now do it in half the time for virtually nothing….

…and I’m SUPER excited to see all of the cool applications that will come out of this golden era!

Happy New Year!  I spent the holidays with my family on a trip to Finland and Russia.  It was my first trip since I returned from South and Central America in July and I quickly caught the travel bug once again.  The experience was a great taste of the cold, dark winters above the 60th parallel famous in so many classic Russian novels.  In addition to the obvious joys of traveling, I spent a great deal of time talking with travelers and locals and wanted to share some quick observations:

• People are still traveling.  Despite the economic woes, people continue to travel and even in Russia, a country arguably hit the hardest by recent events, was full of tourists.
• People love to talk about travel.  Whether actively traveling, reflecting on past travels, or hosting travelers, everyone has travel experiences they want to talk about and share.  From the Russians who can’t get Visas but still tour their own country, to the expert global traveler, everyone has a story.
• The expansion of social networks truly is global.  Even in a place famous for its state-controlled media like Russia, social networking is thriving.  Russians have their own social network and are quickly adopting Facebook.
• Everyday people are the best journalists.  I know I’m preaching to the choir for all Twitter users, but it was amazing to see how much more authentic and accurate information was when provided by the masses as opposed to traditional single-sided media (TV, radio, etc.).  I watched a review of 2008 on state-controlled Russian TV which painted a distinctly different picture than the stories I heard from talking to real people on the streets and in cafes.  The internet is the great equalizer and does, can and will provide the means for people to express their uncensored opinions and stories.
• Internet access is everywhere.  I expected spotty and slow access at best and thus didn’t bring a computer in favor of my iPhone and am pleased to report I found high-quality wifi almost everywhere.
• Couchsurfing again delivered a fantastic experience.  To meet locals and travelers I contacted people through Couchsurfing (which I posted on earlier in this blog) and again I met incredibly interesting, insightful, welcoming people and was treated to unique cultural experiences.

These observations, while not revolutionary, mean a lot to us at Everlater.  After all the work and toil it is a reconfirmation of the power and potential of our idea and our perception of how it can impact the traveler.  Since returning and reflecting on my experience, I am even more excited about our project in both its opportunity to enhance and improve traveler experiences as well as our potential for business success.  Photos from the trip are on my Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nattyz/