Tools for Developers
While considering many different ideas for projects I wanted to work on, I felt that I needed to solve some of my own problems (as a developer) first. Looking back on my own career path and development strong points, I realized that the projects I've had success with have been tools that made my life easier. Take SimpleStore for example. I wanted a simple way to store schema-less data in MySQL and that's what I created. Many of my projects, especially ones I haven't open sourced yet, are geared towards streamlining my own development processes.
I could spend tons of my time working on projects like mobile apps, games, etc, and never come up with something significant or useful. My core competencies seem to be in tooling and automation. I'd like to take some time and describe what I think may be the future of Always Move Fast and this blog.
I've been working on another schema-less datastore that is accessed via a REST API. The original idea was to create a simple database that could be hooked up to web forms. It would allow webmasters and developers to focus on their UI without having to worry about setting up a database, defining a schema, or modifying that schema when they change their forms. I've been having a couple friends test the API out a little. While I don't have a set-in-stone web interface for it yet, I'm going to be opening up the API to developers who want to hammer on it for free.
Something that schema-less databases are a good fit for are spreadsheet representations. I'd like to have a simple version of this concept developed soon so it can be part of the data storage offering.
One of the other tools I've been working on for myself is automated deployment. I wrote some simple scripts to manage deploying code to my production servers and the next step I'd like to take is continuous integration. After I get some of the bugs hammered out, I'm hoping to work on some continuous integration server tech so I can have a nice web interface for managing my tests and deployments.
That's pretty much what's on my radar at the moment. I really just want to offer people the tools I use that make my life as a developer easier. In the next couple days I should have the datastore API ready to be used by anyone. For the time being there won't be any web interface to it, but that's coming soon.
