Posted: Oct 6, 2011
in general
By Carlos Taborda
Thank you Steve
This text is based on a comment I read in HackerNews but I adapted to my own version which expresses my feelings about Steve’s death.
Considering how apparent it was that Steve’s health was gravely bad and rapidly deteriorating, we all in the back of our minds knew the time we had him in this world was limited and precious. So it comes as a complete shock to me how upset I actually am by Steve’s passing.
Even though most of us never knew him, we all feel as if we did know him very well; his inventions, complete labours of love, have become so central to how we live our lives. The profound impact his creations have had on us cannot make us feel any other way.
I remember when I bought my first Mac. It was completely worth it because purchasing that machine literally changed my life.
Without a computer that was an absolute joy to use, I would have never spent so many hours having pleasure while coding and consequently now have the career opportunities that I do.
I feel eternally indebted to Steve, despite having never met the man myself. By creating the wonderful tools he did for us to work with, I feel he is significantly responsible for the career I have today.
To one of the few that can say ‘I changed the world’, thank you.
Rest in peace Steve!
Posted: May 20, 2011
in general
By Carlos Taborda
Posted: May 3, 2011
in general
By Carlos Taborda
Good Bye Slicehost
For the curious: Yes, Slicehost is one of our strongest competitors for sure. But, more than simply competitors they’re also our colleagues, friends and even more imporantly, we value how they helped shape the market we see today. This is a tribute to them for their contribution and great work.
When Slicehost started selling their VPS product back in 2006 I was starting my first company where we did a ton of hosting for enterprise customers, which is no doubt is a very different world from the world that Webbynode exists today. This world was started to get defined by companies such as Slicehost.
Slicehost was one of the first to actually come out and challenge the rules of the “all you can eat” hosting providers by offering a concise and very well focused product, for developers. In reality, they did great a great job, Matt and Jason were smart enough to work together in order to make Slicehost a very ‘personal’ company that you could work with and get all your answers not from some boring guy in a tie, but you’d get an answer from a person just like you, a developer.
Some great stuff from Matt & Jason:
- Hacking Cashflow
- What’s up with the wait list?
- 3 way handshake Ep1
- Slicehost Podcast
- 10k slices and more
Earlier this year I met Matt, and since then he’s become basically an advisor to us. He and I see very eye to eye about what a hosting company for developers should be. In general, we understand the same principles of offering more than simply a barebones product, and offering a service along with it and in general doing the extra steps to get stuff done for customers. This all falls into the same concept of how the small Italian Restaurant is gonna care more than the big ‘brand-chain’ restaurant and usually give you a better quality product.
What’s Matt and Jason up to?
I never personally met Jason, but from what I know he moved to Texas to work with Rackspace after their acquisition. Matt is doing some rad work doing his own investments and also some very cool projects such as DevStructure, its a tool that lets you reverse engineer the setup in a server and generate configurations for Chef and Puppet.
We want to offer our best wishes to the Slicehost founders, and all the guy who worked there to make it to the great successes they had.
Posted: Apr 26, 2011
in carlos talk
By Carlos Taborda
GSD: Getting S#$*T Done
Ever since we started working on Webbynode in 2008, all our work has been long-distance. We’re a distributed team across 3 continents. Working remotely has its advantages and disadvantages, but as any self funded startup we’ve had to do our best with what we got.
- Carlos – Miami
- Felipe – Brasil
- Chris – Austria
- Travis – Knoxville
- Paul – Sacramento
- John – SF
- Ben – NY
About 3 months ago we decided to make a change. Felipe would move to Miami so that we could work closer together, and really push hard to get things done more efficiently. This was a dream come true.
Lets get cranking
Fast forward a few months later, we were very motivated to get started. The first few days we were so happy about working together, we talked and decompressed more than anything. We were not able to get much done. A few days went on like this; not really productive at all -when it finally hit me. We weren’t used to it! We’d grown accustomed to having our private spaces where we could ‘zone-in’ and focus on what we had to do.
For this reason, we decided to try to work from our independent home offices once again. Felipe got himself a nice little office setup, and immediately, we could tell we were being a lot more productive by having a full 5-6 hours of uninterrupted time to get through our daily tasks, plus tasks from the projects we’re working on. However, there was something missing. After moving from Brasil all the way to the US, and still work remotely? Seriously? I mean, we live in the same city now, this is what we had always wished for, wth!?
So one day we were discussing that we should have certain sessions, in order to get through certain parts of projects that needed both of us involved. So, we played to our strengths.
Nightly 2-3 hour sessions
I personally like to work at night. There’s even times, I grab a project and I can easily stay until 6-7AM at it. I simply like it. There’s no girlfriend txting or calling, there’s no phone ringing, and hopefully no tickets are coming in. So, with this in mind, we decided to take daily 3 hour sessions, from about 7pm to 10pm max where interruptions would be minimal – and wow. We really felt this boosted our gsd tremendously. But we had to find a way to channel all our focus into these short sessions.
Mini Projects
Since we’ve gotten accustomed to working with such tools as Basecamp, where you can setup a to-do list and add single tasks to each list, I decided to make our sessions to try to go through a whole todo-list, now dubbed a ‘mini-project’. A mini project, doesn’t mean the whole project will get done in one night, a mini project is simply a large project divided into very little mini ones, this way we can get a sense of gsd every single night.
For example, one of the projects we’re working on, is streamlining the Webbynode Manager user experience. In general, we want to have even less steps for a web app to be deployed onto Webbynode. Firstly, we decided which components need to be streamlined, but that’s still too general. So we decided to go for the initial signup process. We then divided the initial signup process into different mini-projects, such as work to be done in the front-end, changes to the backend is another one, automation is another mini-project, etc – you get the deal.
This allows us to work on each single mini-project per night or even making it a whole week project. But the feeling of gsd, is there every single night. It simply feels like this is the only way to work.
In the end, Felipe’s move to Miami has been greatly beneficial for us. It has allowed us to work in much more sync than we used to, but it also allows us to have enough uninterrupted time where we can tackle the majority of the daily-work. But even though we are not working 100% together, it has actually made the time that we work together much more valuable, therefore making it exponentially more productive.
How do you do it?
How do you do it? Whether its your startup, your consulting firm. How do you GSD? Leave your comments.
Posted: Apr 20, 2011
in general
By Carlos Taborda
Get your Webbynode Stickers!
So you want some stickers eh?
Good news. We received a shipment of brand new Webbynode stickers just today. They’re fresh out of the oven. These high quality stickers are printed on sheets of thick, glossy vinyl.
I know everyone wants to get their hands on these babies, so here’s what we will do to make it fair. For ONE WEEK only we will send stickers to anyone who asks.
For anyone outside the USA, don’t worry we’ll send these anywhere in the world. Just make sure to include your full address. I will literally copy and paste what you fill out in the form.
- If you’re running a conference or usergroup and love Webbynode and you want to give everyone a sticker, let me know and I can arrange to send you as many as you need.
You have until 26th of April 10pm EST Friday 29th of April 10pm EST to make your request, so don’t delay!
Enjoy your Webbynode stickers
Edit: We are not requiring a blog post any longer, we’ll just give them out until they run out.
Update:Submissions closed We’ll be sending out all the stickers shortly. We’re ordering a new batch because we had a lot more entries than stickers. Thanks everyone!
Posted: Apr 3, 2011
in general
By Carlos Taborda
Webbynode’s Reddit
With the launch of our new website, we wanted to revamp the forums, we explored many options to push our community to integrate. However, the more complex the ‘community’ the least we liked the idea.
In the end we decided to go with Reddit as our community, its already wildly used by our customers, its easy to use and we think it will make a difference in the way our community interacts.
So lets get started!
Visit:
Webbynode’s Community
Posted: Mar 30, 2011
in webbynode
By Carlos Taborda
New Website!
We finally launched the new website we’ve been cooking for some time now. Aside of the new awesome design, navigation and content, this site allows us to progressively update it in order to better interact with everyone. Our old website was a pure rails application, and in all honesty a bit of a pain to update and modify constantly, this new one works on a CMS we decided to use, and really works great for us.
Also, we wanted to thank Suhail Patel who helped us with a ton of css fixes. We highly recommend him!
What do you think of the new site? Leave us your comments below please! We’re eager to get everyone’s opinion.
Posted: Feb 21, 2011
in general
By Felipe Coury
Learning from our user’s feedback
We just released a new beta version of our RubyGem.
It has new features, like the webbynode logs command that tails the Rails application logs without the need to SSH into your machine.
But we would like to highlight some features and changes that were triggered by a user’s criticism on Twitter:
bjeanes WTF WebbyNode initialisation adds db/schema.rb to my .gitignore forcing me to not check it in!?!? I think that’s a dealbreaker… 5 months, 1 week ago from Nambu
After this initial tweet, we started a back and forth discussion.
In the end, it was clear to us that the user’s arguments were valid. We asked the user to create a new issue for the problem in our issue tracker, which he did.
As a result of this discussion, we started some foundation work to enhance the Rapp engine.
Historically, we had a lot of schema.rb conflict problems, and our simple solution was to start ignoring it. However, the argument that clicked for us was that “webbynode git remotes are purely used for deploys and not for actual repo hosting”.
It was clear that the solution was not to ignore schema.rb, but instead always “force” our git pushes, avoiding conflicts altogether.
While we were at it, we also added another long-awaited feature: the ability to push different branches to your Webby.
Rapp now always pushes the current active branch, regardless of which branch that is. For example, if you are on the sandbox branch, when you push, the sandbox branch will be loaded on your Webby instead of silently pushing the master branch under the hood.
With all that, what we learned is that listening to users, regardless of the channel, is always important and can lead to key improvements to your product and, in consequence, to more satisfied users.
All these changes are available in Webbynode gem version 1.0.4.beta4 that can be installed by running:
[shell]$ [sudo] gem install –pre webbynode [/shell]
Here’s a summary of all changes and new features:
- New console command to remotely access Rails app console
- New logs command to tail Rails log
- New settings command to list all settings of the current app
- Skip database creation and migration with wn settings add skipdb true (specially useful for MongoDB apps)
- Always forces a push of the current branch
- Fixed a bug when .gitignore didn’t have a newline at the end of file
So this has been and will still remain our commitment: to listen to you. Please let us know if you run into any problems while testing this new version.
Posted: Feb 21, 2011
in webbynode
By Felipe Coury
Remote Rails console for Rapp
One of the most requested features for Rapp was the ability to access the Rails console without SSH’ing into your Webby. Well, now you can do it easily, as long as you have a Rails 3 app. We have no current plans for Rails 2, unless we get a lot of user feedback asking for it.
We just released version 1.0.4.beta3 (after two mistakes with 1.0.4.beta1 and 1.0.4.beta2) and we’d love to have your feedback.
So just install the new version:
$ gem install --pre webbynode
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Webbynode Rapid Deployment Gem
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Thank you for installing Webbynode gem. You're now
able to deploy and manage your applications from
the comfort of your command line.
Please read our guide for a quickstart:
http://guides.webbynode.com/articles/rapidapps/
Successfully installed webbynode-1.0.4.beta3
1 gem installed
And then, go to a folder where you have a deployed Rails 3 Rapp app and run:
$ wn console
Connecting to Rails console...
Loading production environment (Rails 3.0.0)
irb(main):001:0>
And that’s it. Please let us know your impressions by leaving a comment.
Posted: Feb 5, 2011
in general
By Felipe Coury
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 support
We just pushed a change that enables users to take full advantage of version 3.0.0 of Phusion Passanger that was just launched.
If you have a Webby with a ReadyStack or Rapp engine and you’re running a previous version of Passenger with nginx and REE, just run this command:
curl -L http://wbno.de/uppas | bash
And it will upgrade Phusion Passenger to the latest version. Apache users will have to update manually for the time being.
For Apache users:
gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module
You may have to install additional packages, just follow the normal Passenger install instructions.
After the install is finished, the lines Passenger requires to load for apache are located in a file called passenger.conf in /etc/apache2/conf.d
Please make the needed changes to this file and run:
/etc/init.d/apache2 reload
And you should be running Passenger 3.
Documentation for the upgrade procedure for Ruby 1.9.2 and Nginx coming later this week.
