massplastic

SproutCore maddness

Farewell Engine Yard

A project I have been associated with for the past 7 months had initially decided to use Engine Yard as our host. We felt that they had the expertise, clout, and infrastructure to be our eyes and ears when it came time to scale. We were building the app in ruby on rails, and Engine Yard’s employees are some of the biggest and brightest names in the ruby world, so the added expense of an EY deployment was thought to be well worth it.

In fact, it was my sole recommendation to go with them. I felt that it would be better to have the developers worry about development and EY to worry about sysadmin. Too often, especially in the rails world, developers must wear the sysadmin hat, and for this project I wanted to leave that up to the pros.

I’m not going to go into too much detail, but the problem for us came in communication. EY uses support tickets for everything, including changing basic info like your password and email address. For me, the time delay to get things like this done is frustrating. Once, our entire application was accidentally deleted from our staging slice by a tech. I often found our requests were only partially completed, and the last straw came when we ordered a production slice to finally launch our project and was having to make the same support requests I had made for the staging slice. I wasn’t about to go through all that again.

All in all, EY just wasn’t a good fit for our particular project. There have been repeated delays in our project, and our project didn’t fit the typical rails app mold. There is no doubt in my mind that once we got setup into production EY would have been a rock star for us. That’s were I think the real benefit would have kicked in.

Anyway, we moved to Slicehost, which I have used for several smaller projects, and I had all our slices and cap deployments setup within 2 hours. It’s cheaper and more hands on, but I think that is what I like about it.

Disneyland

Code on the Side

When I was in college, I was always struggling to get the class I wanted, at the times I wanted, with the teachers I wanted. I solved a lot of that problem by building a little script for my personal use that would text-message me letting me know someone had dropped a course that was full and I was trying to add.

Anyway, it took me awhile to get the time, but I finally rolled it into a website that I hope other students find useful.

I’m calling it DropMessenger.