We love developing web applications now.

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!