SineSignal Blog

Year of the Moncai

2010-12-23T02:18:06-05:00

As the holiday’s and new year approach and to fulfill my commitment of being open, I thought it would be good to do a quick post updating everybody on Moncaí. We all know that 2011 is the year of the rabbit, but I hope it can also be known as the year of the Moncaí. I’m sorry, but I can’t wait until 2016 to release, but it would of been awesome if it turned out that way! ;-) Although it might seem like I’m not doing anything from the outside, however the last few months have been actually quite intense as I ramp up to begin the private beta. :-)

I posted the announcement on Moncaí a little over a month ago not really thinking it would catch on so fast. I wanted to gauge the interest from the community before I took my little proof of concept to a fully supported service. I created a landing page with the amazing guys over at Fixel containing a private beta sign-up form. I tweeted about the post and it grew from there. I also did an interview with the guys over at Herding Code as a last minute interview, to hopefully fill in some blanks and provide more information on the announcement and what Moncaí is and isn’t.

I then decided to take a personal approach to replying to everybody who was signing-up for the private beta. That took some time, but it was well worth it and received. You can read more about it in a previous post.

I am happy to report that quite a few of you are interested in participating in the private beta! Now that I have a good pool of user’s willing to participate, I can begin ramping up for the beta. I have been spending the past month on putting all the necessary internal processes in place to send out the invites. The goal is to make everything as smooth as possible for you guys. It will be as easy as clicking a link in the email to activate your account with directions on where to go from there and you’ll be pushing your first application within minutes of activation. My goal is to begin sending out the initial invites towards the end of January with full documentation on what is available at the time. Also, the web application for the administration side of Moncaí will be functional only and not fully designed yet. I wanted to get everything to you guys as soon as possible. Let me know how you feel about this decision? I will be posting from time to time updating you guys on the progress and also even photos of the hardware. Once the beta begins, I plan on writing up another blog post explaining how Moncaí works internally, for those who want more details as I can’t give too much away right now.

We’re already gearing up to make 2011 an awesome year to be a .NET/Mono web application developer and hopefully bring some new user’s into our awesome community and ecosystem as well. I’m already planning for more podcasts for 2011 and maybe you’ll catch me at some events. Other than that, I’ll be cranking away on Moncaí based on feedback received in the beta working towards that day we can say we’re in production.

Until then, I wish everybody a happy holiday and new year! See you next year! ;-)

Moncai Invite Confirmation Process

2010-11-22T11:39:30-05:00

Here’s a little note on the process I am using to send the confirmations out. I decided to take a personal approach in sending out the confirmations than most of you are probably used to. I am manually sending the confirmation to every person that signed-up to explain that their request has been received and I am holding their place in the queue when the private beta starts. With nothing more than your email address, I am doing a quick search about you and reading anything that I find. I then take that info and write a personal note within the confirmation. If I don’t find anything, the email will not have the personal note. This process takes time, but I think it’s worth it in the end. I am hoping this helps in opening the dialog between you and I to make a better beta experience for everybody. The other goal is to show I care about how you plan on using Moncaí and that you’re not just a number to me. I am already receiving positive feedback about this process and who ever said that the .NET/Mono community isn’t passionate, hasn’t read the emails I’ve received over the announcement of Moncaí and the replies I’ve received to the confirmation emails that I’ve sent out so far.

That’s right, I started sending out confirmations to those who signed-up for the Moncaí private beta over the weekend. If you haven’t received yours yet, be rest assured it’s coming. I am estimating to finish the list either tomorrow or Wednesday. We’ve been monitoring Twitter and other places and based on what people are saying and it’s great to see the excitement people are showing in hearing from us.

Please let us know what you think about the process in the comments or by replying to your invite confirmation.

Moncai Aftermath

2010-11-17T01:07:29-05:00

Well, it’s been about 5 days since we made the announcement about Moncaí and all we can say is wow! We had no idea that our announcement would spread the way it has and we owe it all to you! You guys rock!

Now, we want to explain the invite process. The invite process is strictly to control the growth and build a list of customer’s interested in using the system in it’s early stages. Then, we will ramp up gradually when we feel it is safe to do so. Once we are at scale, we will drop the invite process and be open to all for a short public beta period.

We will be sending out responses to everyone who have signed up for the private beta very soon and they will be processed in the order they were received. The response will serve as a confirmation that we received your request and that you are in the queue. Those who have signed up, you should start hearing from us this week. We are also currently working on setting up forums for everybody to participate in and creating a FAQ. You can also expect the forum and FAQ this week.

Please remember, launching what we are building will take time. We are committed to developing rapidly, but you, our customers, will be placing a great deal of trust in Moncaí and it’s technology stack to serve your applications securely and dependably. We, nor any of our partners, do not want to violate that trust. Taking that into account, we are aiming sometime this Winter to start adding user’s to the system for the private beta. The announcement was just the first step and we have a ton of work to do in taking our proof-of-concept and turning it into something you will be using. Those that are signed-up right now should not have to wait too long once we begin the private beta and more than likely will be the first set allowed in.

Introducing Moncai

2010-11-11T09:39:35-05:00

From day one, we’ve been hinting about a product we’ve been developing, but as much as we hated it. We had to wait to release the news due to branding, designing, and etc. Well, the wait is over! We are happy to announce Moncaí! Moncaí is a platform as a service(PAAS) cloud solution for .NET/Mono web applications. If you’re wondering how to pronounce Moncaí, it’s pronounced just like monkey. Which is funny, since that’s the definition of Moncaí. Moncaí is the Irish translation for monkey.

So what’s the plan?

Our plan is to release the service in stages, by first having a private beta, where we can control the initial load and work out the issues. From there, we will do a public beta, although this stage will not be very long. Our hope is to do the majority of the work during the private beta. Then, once the public beta is complete, we will release. We will be offering incentives during the beta periods by giving out credits to be applied to your accounts or by sending out swag, like stickers and t-shirts, based on the level feedback and involvement.

Now for a little information on how Moncaí is going to work. Deploying to Moncaí will take advantage of your favorite distributed version control system(DVCS). That’s right, deploy your web applications with ease by using Git or Mercurial by simply issuing a push command. Git will be the first supported tool, but we do have plans on adding Mercurial support at some point. Your app will then be virtualized in it’s own POSIX environment and ready for the world to see. Then you’ll be able to scale your web application up and down based on the load and only pay for what you use. We will be rolling out a free plan to start out with and you can choose what you need from there, based on your needs. Since we are open to the bone, a majority of what is developed will be open-sourced in pieces.

We said it would be legen, wait for it, dary! We hope you’re as excited as we are to be taking on this challenge and we are looking forward in building this service with you! The next update will be releasing the help area which will consist of a Faq and Forums where you can find the answers to common questions that we are receiving and also to start participating in the Moncaí community. Until then, feel free to ask questions in the comments or by emailing us. We hope you enjoy the ride!

Where are those darn scissors?

2010-11-03T11:05:49-04:00

Oh, here they are! Finally, here’s to cutting the proverbial ribbon on the new SineSignal website and our first blog post. We’re thrilled to get what we have out into the public and start gaining readership and hopefully start the speculation of what we’ll be announcing. Now to explain a little about the site, we know the site isn’t fully functional and that the markup is a work in progress. We wanted to stay true to our principles of being open to our future customers from the very beginning. We’re going to take this time in saying that we’re treating the launch of the new website as a sort of countdown to our first product announcement. This allows you to learn about us while the branding of our first product goes through it’s design process. We will be adding new pages as fast as we can and announce the product once the branding is done. If you’re curious, you can see what the website will eventually look like by going to our flickr stream. We are adding images of the design as we progress through the markup phase.

This site and blog are the first public signs of progress, but trust us. We have plenty going on behind the scenes. Here’s a current list of what’s going on inside SineSignal:

Prepping for the announcement of our first product, you’re going to love it
Our own open-source products (Ottoman and Portán)
Contributing to MonoDevelop
- Git integration
- Update NUnit to 2.5.5
- Exclude and Include projects support
Contributing to SpecFlow
- NUnit add-in enhancement for generating SpecFlow step from test output
Plus the countless other business tasks you have to do as a new business

That’s right, besides working on our own products, we contribute back to open-source as a company. We’ve already been heavily involved in the above open-source projects and look forward to contributing more. We also have our own open-source projects and you’ll learn more about those soon, once we finish up the software section of the site.

A big thanks goes out to Josh Hemsley over at The Visual Click for designing this site. He is truly a great designer and an asset to any startup. All the markup has been done in house by us using web standards. Feel free to follow us on twitter or subscribe to our feed to keep up to date. Also, let us know how you like the site or just to say hello or tell us which part of the site you want to see next, by leaving a comment. You can also contact us by email.