88 Miles: Category Opinion

It's a business, not a startup

Myles Eftos — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:46:00 +0800

The Beachhouse has had a steady stream of visitors recently, that have been involved with startups. It has been interesting how 88 Miles is considered a “Startup” which hasn't really been sitting well with me — 88 Miles is a product of MadPilot Productions, which isn't really a startup either.

Well, 37 Signals has just run a blog post, that explains why I have been uneasy. I'm not running a startup — I'm running a business. And I agree that people think in terms of startups, not businesses.

So if you are running a startup, make sure you are running a business too.

New Computer? SaaS is the way to go

Myles Eftos — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:35:00 +0900

I just purchased an ASUS Eee PC and as I was setting up my desktop environment, I realised that after I set up my web browser, I was basically done — because I rely so heavily on SaaS for day-to-day tasks. Not only that, I don't have to worry about whether the tiny 900Mhz processor (under-clocked to 630Mhz) would be up to the task of running my apps. And best all all, because Firefox run in Linux, there is no compatibility issues.

I use (obviously) use 88 Miles for my time tracking, Saasu.com for accounts, Google Apps for office facilities (although, I do admit, I'm still not on Gmail yet). For my RSS, Newsgator has a web version, and I can still get my Twitter feed via their web interface.

This, I think is the best example of why SaaS rocks. In less than 15 minutes, all of the software that I use everyday was ready and waiting for me.

Enterprise Rails

Myles Eftos — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:17:00 +0900

Anyone in the Rails community would have read Zed Shaw’s rant about Rails. For those of you who don’t know Zed, he wrote Mongrel, which is the default web server library used in Rails, and which coincidently powers 88 Miles. It has blown up and been discussed on just about every rails list around. I’m not going to discuss what he said, or his tone, as it has been done to death, and he seems like the type of guy that you need to know to understand where he is coming from.

What did hit home from me was what he said out enterprise Rails. To frame this correctly, have a listen to the first half of this podcast from RailsConf.

As a rubyist, I could never understand why projects like JRuby or IronRuby existed. Why would you want to run another language in a different virtual machine? After reading and listening to Zed, the answer is obvious - integration for enterprise. If you look at existing enterprise systems they will run on technologies such as Java and ASP.NET and as a result, prefer to use things like Tomcat and IIS - they don’t know (or care) about Mongrel or Lighttpd or even Apache in many cases.

So take the easy and speed of development of Rails and put it into an environment that has traditionally been in the realm of complex systems that are hard to maintain and hard to use. Instead of worrying about writing XML configuration files, developers can spend more time making sure their apps are easy to use

I've been playing around with IronRuby a little lately, and am planning on trying out JRuby just to see how it is all going to fit together — and I have to admit, I'm getting pretty excited about having a truely cross server language that will be easy to deploy and maintain.