Quite A Week

Since getting the "alpha" version up and available, reasonablysmart.com has had quite a week. It all started with Tim O'Reilly's keynote. From there the interest has grown quickly. The site has seen significant traffic everyday and it's coming from all over the world. There has been a number of writes ups and the CIO article has been reprinted in many online publications. James is receiving much appreciated feedback on the platform. There have also been interview requests. V good for the first week with no money.


Now it is time to get serious and raise the required capital to make a business out of what we have started. We have already written a overview of the business plan and today we will finalize the financial forecasts. We should be ready to talk to potential financial partners by Friday.


If anybody is interested in finding out more about our exciting new venture please contact me at bbogens1@gmail.com.

Article from the Keynote

CIO magazine also made mention of reasonablysmart.com as a result of Tim's Wednesday Keynote. It's great to be a cool startup!

Reasonably Smart Keynote Mention

It was very good of Tim O'Reilly to mention the Reasonably Smart Platform during his OSCON keynote.

Introduction

Hello Software World! My name is Bryan and I would like to introduce myself. I am the co-founder of Reasonably Smart**. In fact I am the reasonably smart one. James Duncan, my friends, is the really, really smart one.

Despite founding and operating a SaaS company for the past 8 years I have never really immersed myself into the software development environment outside of my own company. This has now changed.

James and I are working hard to create a powerful, exciting and value delivering Platform as a Service that we can all sink our teeth into and derive value from. We are building this platform so that it will support everyone from the individual to the corporation. The two of us are both are very much aligned in overall philosophy about how this platform must be designed. Fundamentally it must be:

• Open
• Scalable, redundant, secure, etc.
• Full-featured at the application level
• Well-supported beyond the help desk - more specifically, solid professional services
• Did I say open?
• Integrated with version control
• Free of lock-in tactics
• Open

I, obviously, will be concentrating on the business building elements of growing this company so, when you are reading my posts, you will be reading about things like:

• The company's product road-map
• The revenue model
• The professional services and support we will be offering
• The company's funding activities
• The developer community that we will try to bring together
• The applications that we will build to give our customers a head start
• The company's human resource needs

We now have the "alpha" version up and running at reasonablysmart.com. We are hoping that you can spend a little time playing around with it and providing us with some feedback.

While you are doing that and James continues to work on the infrastructure I will be putting the finishing touches on the business plan. We will then contact targeted potential funding organizations to see if we can secure the needed capital for the next steps of the plan.

Please stay tuned. This is going to be a very fun and interesting ride...

** a working name - comments welcome

Next!

...on the code front, having done the Apache integration is the object store.  I'm still writing documentation for what we have already, but I'm talking specifically about code here.

As you'd know from the open source code, a part of the Candomble (the internal name for the object store) is based upon SQLite.  Specifically, the bit that writes to disk, when it needs to.

However, we're designing this system to run on multiple machines, transparently, so what becomes absolutely needed is a message passing architecture.

Here are some of the basic requirements of a cloud object store:

1. Distributed - the system needs to distribute data across many machines
2. "Self Aware" - as more machines come into play, the load is shared without any manual configuration on the part of the datastore clients or the datastores themselves.
3. Redundant - each piece of data always needs to be in at minimum, two places
4. Predictable - should go without saying really, but the datastore needs to have predictable speed.  It's easy to make it go blindingly fast, but better is that it operates at a reasonable pace, all the time.
5. Segmented - again, it should be obvious.  Because we're storing data for multiple sites, it needs to segment itself nicely into data partitions for each of those sites, without fear of that data colliding. 

There are others, but those are the ones I'm having to deal with right now.

Managed to break OpenID

I really like OpenID, but at times its a really finicky thing. I'm getting to the point that if I change something, the first thing I check is OpenID to see if it's still working.

It's all working again now, but it always seems to be touch and go...

*sigh*

Apache Integration Done

Well, that's the Apache integration done. It was a bit hairy this morning, trying to get it all running.

Still, I got there in the end, and it's all tied together nicely. Appropriate layers of abstraction are cool!

Code is up!

With Reasonably Smart, we're committed to being as open as we possibly can. In the case of our software, it's mostly open source already. You can fetch it now, using git, by cloning http://platform.reasonablysmart.com:81/.

The next parts I need to work on (and its getting urgent) are moving away from the hand-rolled web server (which has served us well, and is great for development purposes) and on to Apache. This won't be hard, I just need to get it done.

Getting Started... wow!

We're just getting started at reasonablysmart.com, and it's quite an endeavor we're embarking upon.

The system is, of course, in its infancy, but we're trying to do the right thing from the start.