There's no Place Like ::1

Take a screenshot of your desktop right now, don’t change anything, post it on your blog!

Ever since the beginning, Phusion Passenger (aka, mod_rails) impressed me. I still can’t believe how such a small team managed to build a simple solution to this complex problem that is Ruby on Rails deployment.

I’ve heard in the past about the Passenger benefits. When I first tried it, the only thing I kept thinking was “this is exactly like PHP! this is exactly like PHP!”...

Moreover, using Passenger and Apache, you can get much better resource management, since it starts and stops instances based on the load of the website.

I think enough time has passed since the public release of Passenger. Since I’m still running this Rails blog on a Via C3 @ 533Mhz, I decided to replace my previous setup (lighttpd proxying to a mongrel instance, monitored by monit) to a new Apache2 + Passenger.

Working on a startup is certainly a great challenge that has both good and bad things. One of the worst things is the amount of blog posts I’ve made on the last 6 months: 15 (fifteen!). This is almost 1 post every two weeks. As a reference point, on my last job I was writing 2 blogs posts per week :-)

Anyway, 6 months ago I decided to take the challenge and work for a startup in Lisbon called 7syntax. 7syntax is a young software startup with a small team of great talents. The main project we develop is called handivi, and that’s the main motivation for this blog post.

Handivi is all about you sharing experiences with everyone or just your friends from anywhere. It’s a free, easy to use application for Java™ enabled phones on 3G mobile networks, where you can express yourself, create and socialize using photos, videos and messaging.

The first alpha version of handivi saw the light of the world by 29th August. Celso made a good job showing the alpha’s main features. It was a very exciting moment for all the team because we showed our “baby” to the world!

With this release, we managed to gather a lot of feedback from our brave testers. That feedback is extremely useful to us, since it will guide our development efforts in the near future.

In the meantime, I became the Lead Mobile Developer at 7syntax. This means I gathered a lot of knowledge about the J2ME programming, including device fragmentation problems, limitations of the current technology, under the hood details and optimization strategies. You can expect some blog posts about the things I’ve discovered, if I managed to get free time to write about them :)

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