dotCloud is one of my favourite companies. They’re a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) start-up supporting a variety of stacks such as Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and node.js.

As much as I enjoy working with unix systems and setting up web servers, they shift my main focus: developing web applications. As a one man show, my time is very scarce. While I was working with PHP, hosting apps used to be extremely simple. I could easily get a dirt cheap shared hosting for a few bucks and FTP the code. Even for bigger applications, setting up a LAMP stack was and still is very simple. However, PHP days are over and Python/Django is what I use for most of the web development.

I’ve used two ways to host Django applications. For small apps I’ve used Webfaction which is also a great company and highly recommended for shared hosting. Sharing servers with others have always been painful for me so the next solution was a virtual server. Linode is my preferred VPS provider and they’ve been amazing. This is probably the best bang for your buck.

For a recent project I needed this stack:

• Django
• PostgreSQL
• MongoDB
• Solr

To setup all these manually in your VPS, you’ll need multiple servers, good technical knowledge, lots of time and patience. Setting up these might take a day or two, but securing, maintaining and scaling them would take a lot longer.

This is where dotCloud shines. I can easily deploy multiple stacks which are secure, have redundancy, and can scale with a few commands. Deploying staging/development servers would also take a few seconds (try this with your VPS). With their new pricing model, you can have unlimited development apps which is great for people like me who start many projects and complete a few

What I don’t like about dotCloud:

• No servers in Europe.
• According to their new beta pricing, databases are billed by their RAM usage. I think this should be based on storage.
• No naked domains. You have to use www before your domain name, which is a big limitation.
• Support. With 10M investment, you would think they could hire a few people to work in the weekends. But no, my app was down for 12 hrs in one weekend, and the reply I got was “On week-ends, our on-call team get paged only by Enterprise Plan customers.” I wasn’t in the position to complain as a non-paying beta user, but it still was disappointing.

I want to thank dotCloud for making my life much easier and less stressful. Ep.io and Djangy are two django specific PaaS’s who couldn’t stay around. I’m hopeful that dotCloud will make it.

When I tell people I work from home that’s not entirely true. I can rarely get anything done at home as I usually open the fridge every 10 minutes and watch Youtube while lying on my couch. Hence, if I have work to do, I have a rule of leaving my apartment ½ hour after waking up. This is when I didn’t have to go to an office. These days I’m mostly at coffee shops to get work done. I wanted to create an archive of all the places I’ve worked at. Here is the evolution so far:

2004. This is the University Center Building at the University of Victoria. Two things to notice: the beautiful iMac with iSight camera and my hair style!

2008. The new Neverblue office. This was in a really cool building in downtown Victoria. The section in the photo below is for developers. Sadly, I didn’t spend much time in the new office as I moved to Vancouver.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neverbluecreative/3563942977/in/photostream

2009: I had a nice desk at an engineering company in Yale Town for a short time. Excellent location with a Yoga studio next door

2010: My office at the CAPTURE Project located at the Simon Fraser University. I wish it had windows as the view would’ve been gorgeous.

2011: Waves coffee in Commercial Drive, Vancouver. Working in the weekend. Good place for people watching.

2011: This is a coffee shop where I spent 2-3 days in Toronto. Had to get some work done during my visit.

2012: Caffè Nero in Caddebostan, Istanbul. Due to its proximity to my apartment, I’ve been working there everyday for the last month. Excellent sea view.

Yurtdışına.com‘da bir şehir profilinde neler olmalı? Bu sayfayı her ne kadar zor olsa da sade tutmaya çalışıyorum.

• Şehrin profiline gelenler üyelerin bu şehirle etkileşimlerini görebilsinler. En son kimler tavsiye eklemiş, soru sormuş, burada bulunmuş gibi.
• Şehri simgeleyen bir fotoğraf sol sütunda bulunabilir.
• Şehir fotosunun altında, dünya haritası ve şehrin konumu olabilir.
• Haritanın altında da buraya “gidenler” ve “gitmek isteyenler” diye iki tab listelenebilir.
• Şehir isminin yanında iki buton olabilir: “Gittim” ve “Gitmek istiyorum”.
• Şehir isminin altında ise 3 önemli tab bulunabilir:
• İlk tab altında yeniden eskiye göre sıralı olan-bitenler.
• İkinci tab altında bu şehir için eklenen tavsiyeler.
• Son tab altında da bu şehir ile ilgili soru&cevaplar.
• Kullanıcılar şehir profilindeyken kolayca tavsiye ve soru ekleyebilsinler diye iki de buton bulunabilir.

Yukarıdaki mock-up’a tıklayarak bunu daha detaylı görebilirsiniz. Lütfen önerilerinizi paylaşın.

Geçen sene yurtdışına.com‘u bir süreliğine açıp yakın çevrem arasında test etmiştim. Gelen geri bildirimler arasında en yaygın olanı sitenin amacının tam olarak belli olmamasıydı. Yurtdışına.com‘da okul profilleri, yurtdışı eğitim acenta sayfaları, okul yorumları, forumlar, yurtdışındaki Türk işletmeleri gibi bölümler bulunmaktaydı ve gereğinden fazla kitleye hitap etmeğe çalışıyordu.

Yurtdışına.com’un yeni vizyonu çok daha basit.

Yurtdışına seyahat, eğitim ve iş gibi amaçlarla çıkanların ve çıkmak isteyenlerin tavsiyelerini paylaşabilecekleri, bilgi alışverişinde bulunabilecekleri bir sosyal ağ.

Sosyal ağ diyorum çünkü amacım benzer düşüncede olan (yurtdışına çıkmayı ve seyahat etmeği seven) kişilere ortak bir platform sunabilmek ve bir araya getirebilmek. Projenin detayları belli oldukça paylaşacağım.

I was very excited about Posterous. The simplicity and ease of use made me a big fan and I did make many of my friends use this blogging platform. Like many things, what started as a simple and fast service, became confusing and slow. Twitter bought the platform for talent acquisition and I’m guessing they’ll turn off the lights soon.

I closed my account and didn’t even bother porting my years of posts as they were mostly photos (which are already posted at my Instagram). So here we go again. This time with good old friend WordPress.

ps. The photo has nothing to do with Posterous. I took that photo in Çevlik and wanted to test this template