The State of Me - Jan 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 15:15 by Jón Grétar Borgþórsson Well. Just a little status update on me and my various projects for 2008.
2008 was a good year for me and my education as a developer. I got to know Erlang at the middle of the year and by the end of the year I was almost exclusively coding in Erlang. I have also started learning some standard C for playing with Arduino. I also learned the basics of Emacs and so far I like it though I still use Textmate for many things. And I started using Git and Github. I was to begin with skeptical about it and the fact that Linus Thorvalds was a bit of a dick when talking about it didn't help. But once I tried it I found it to be very productive and combined with GitHub it's quickly revolutionizing open source development in the world.
I became a contributor to the Nitrogen Web Framework. I have many ideas for it and hope to add many things to it. Nitrogen is at a very exciting stage as we are finding the path we want to take and can make many choices at this stage.
Is started playing with a little project I call CouchMail. It's basically a quick ugly hack to research gluing together a mail server with Nitrogen, Cappuccino, Mochiweb and finally CouchDB for data storage. If this works out ok I may consider writing a real application from scratch from what I learn.
I forked CouchDBX and completely rewrote the UI. I like my changes as they remove CouchDB from the desktop and you don't have to know about it until it is needed. I have most of the new code needed for CouchDB 0.9.0 ready so it should come out as soon as the new CouchDB is released.
ErlangXcode is an attempt to make Apple's Xcode 3 IDE be a kick ass Erlang IDE. A lot of the basic syntax is there with some, like records, still to be implemented. Also a basic build system in place and compilation errors show up in-code. I had to take a bit a break from it before going nuts though. Xcode's plugin system is 100% undocumented and there is no way do debug anything. What you have to do is to make small changes, compile and then reboot Xcode. There are no errors. The code just works, quietly doesn't work or it crashes Xcode. Hopefully I will quickly have energy to deal with it again soon. I did however start a little wiki project at google code documenting the xcode plugin system.
Finally there is a little project I started in the middle of the year called AstAssist. It's in a bit of a pause at the moment but basically it is an Erlang based system for Asterisk management. It's a complete solution for configuration, monitoring, event parsing, fastagi and so on. I have some of the basics done and hope to continue later in the year.
Well.. That's the bullet points. Hope some or all of these will become something amazing in 2009.
Reader Comments (6)
Awesome - this is a very dense post (dense in the sense that it's chock full of lots of good links to projects I didn't know about). I had no idea about Nitrogen, the Erlang XCode project, or your rework of CouchDBX. Very interesting from a casual observer of erlang/couchdb happenings. Thanks for the enlightenment!
Since you mentioned git and github, I'll make a mandatory reference to Mercurial and BitBucket :-)
Feel free to do so. :)
Do you know of an affordable webhost supporting nitrogen? Or is it still a plaything if you don't have your own host?
@Author - cool stuff! I'm jealous of your productivity :)
@Einar - Just get the cheapest slice from slicehost.com. Install Erlang. Install Nitrogen. And you're done. It'll be long before web hosting companies support Nitrogen officially (if that ever happens).
Harish: It can be called productivity when I actually finish some of these. ;) Until then it can only be called having to many ideas and too little time.
Einar: Like with most frameworks really it's best to host it yourself. Self hosting is cheaper if anything. Slicehost is cheap as hell($20 a month) and with Amazon EC2 you can cheaply make a fault tolerant website handling tens of thousands of users. Shared hosting, to me at least, is really only acceptable for PHP and ASP. Nitrogen's (by way of Erlang) power lies in fault tolerance and distribution. Shared hosting would be difficult when dealing with Erlang much like it is with Java, Ruby and most others.