Here’s another one-day app that and I put together last Monday. It’s a Twitter/Google Maps mashup that uses the that the has made possible. The actual functionality was mostly Jason’s work; my contributions had more to do with interface and general design concept this time around. I’m particularly happy with the fail-whale massacre.
Syndeo has got another 3 apps currently in the pipeline as I write this and I’ve been musing recently about what’s changed, i.e., why have we suddenly been churning them out with such gusto. In the past two months we’ve released Highfiber, Infinitube, Twuzzer, and have significantly redesigned the Octales alpha. Within the next 30 days, we’ll have twice that number up and running. I had initial thoughts as to why it was happening, and I remember rejecting them initially because they seemed a little too convenient. But here they are anyway, marketing be damned.
I think it has a lot to do with MorphExchange. I first tried this Philippine-operated hosting platform in late March and recall being very skeptical about the offering. My main beef was that I had, over the past two years, been slowly improving my systems-administration skills and suddenly I was faced with an environment where those skills were essentially reduced to clicking “Restart Process.” Many, many hosting internals were obfuscated by MorphExchange in an effort to both simplify the hosting workflow and (I suppose) to protect their compute cloud from too much curious poking.
Over the past four months, a handful of interesting things have happened that changed my mind about the experience. The first was that the MEx service got better, obviously. They added rake tasks and scheduling, better logging, worked out a number of load-balancer issues, and polished up the user-interface significantly. The second was that I started getting into the idea of “deploy and forget,” i.e., you push your application to production and essentially know that they will run, unless your code was screwed up somehow.
In a way, “deploy and forget” is the only hosting methodology that would make sense for the kind of small apps that Syndeo likes building. Because we have so many of them, we’re unable to go through the hassle of setting up and maintaining new servers for each new product. When I built Infinitube two weeks ago, the single biggest time sink was building my server and Rails stack. The app itself took about 3 hours to write, another 3 hours to build the GUI, and nearly 2 hours just to deploy to a working server. I realize now that if I had deployed to MEx instead our other hosting provider, I would have saved myself a good 90 minutes, and quite a bit of grief. (I know that doesn’t sound like a lot of savings, but when you measure your development-cycles in hours instead of weeks, that’s a huge deal. 90 minutes is the difference between leaving the office on time, and leaving the office exhausted and pissed off at yourself.)
So when Jason and I built Twuzzer earlier this week, I was confident in the notion that it’d take about 5 minutes to register the domain name, configure the DNS and deploy to MorphExchange. Jason started building the app at 9:30am on Monday the 28th; I got involved about two hours later. By about 4pm we were entering the cleanup and polish stage, and by 5:50pm we started setting up the MEx account. Plenty of time to spare. Twuzzer.com became globally accessible later that evening, while I was busy getting smashed at a nearby beer garden.
Now, before I start to sound like a sock-puppet, I will temper this entry by saying that there are a number of areas that MEx could stand to improve. The deploy process needs more error-notices, for example, and I’m still unsure what MEx plans to do regarding SMTP. (C’mon guys, practically every virtual-hosting provider has outgoing-email, it’s just one of those basic features you throw in.) Part of the reason why I can make unreserved recommendations about them is because it fits our situation so well. I’m not running an internet banking application, or an e-commerce portal, or a biometrically-secured, multi-threaded arse-sniffing machine. Our apps are supposed to be small, modest and fun, and I’ll be damned if I pay more than a dollar a day for each one, yessirree!
Over the next couple of weeks, we should see a number of other mini-apps from our lab, very likely hosted on MorphExchange. We’ve got an MP3 search-and-play app, a make-the-world-a-better-place app and (I’m crossing my fingers with this one) the actual Labs site for showcasing all of these small treasures. See you in a bit.
