Adventures in Software

Posted: October 14th, 2007 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Erlang | View Comments

I’m embarking on a new adventure and I’m a little nervous. I’ve decided to try my hand at the micro-ISV game. I’ve read the book and the website. I’m dissatisfied with my career. I love writing software. I get a big charge out of watching people use the software I help to create. But I’ve been implementing someone else’s ideas. Someone else’s vision or grand product plan. I need to try to put something that is wholly my own out into the world. I’m really not sure why I’m driven to do this but I do know that I’ll most likely burn out or go crazy if I don’t.

Setting up a micro-ISV seemed to me to be the safest way to reach my goal without gambling the house and my ability to put food on the table for my family. In the evenings I’ve been beavering away pulling together enough of the details to get a launch page up and running. Naggly is the result of my these efforts. Please take a look and register your email address if you’re interested.

The current backend is implemented using Yaws, a few .yaws pages with some dynamic Erlang code, and mnesia. The frontend is a mixture of XHTML, CSS, and the extremely useful ExtJS toolkit. With the “launching soon” page out of the way I’ll be turning my attention to Naggly, the application. For that I’ll be basing web development around the ErlyWeb suite of frameworks augmented with a couple of OTP servers for the scheduling and messaging.

I have a lot of learning to do since I’ve never written a seriously large Erlang application so I fully anticipate making my share of mistakes along the way. I do think Erlang’s features coupled with the development speed functional programming provides will allow me to deliver this a lot faster than I could otherwise.

  • @merlyn -- Oops! Thanks for taking the time to point out the bug. This has been fixed.

    @bob - Thanks for the idea and words of encouragement. At this stage I'll take all of that I can get. I tried not to get into too much detail to keep the copy light, but I'm planning on providing some standard reminder "templates" for common reminders so you can set up a reminder with just a few clicks.
  • Sexy looking effects you have there. There's a bug in your email address validation though. "a.b@somewhere.com" disables the Send button. So as it stands I can't register. :(
  • Kevin, welcome to the club and good look. I am moving myself from independant consultant to micro-ISV, and I am also coding in Erlang !
  • Kevin - Welcome to the microISV life! I like your idea and have a suggestion - what about a form that I could use to check off things to be emailed about? Birthdays, car maintenance etc.
  • @michael - I looked at RTM before deciding to pursue Naggly. I'm not much of a list maker. I'm the guy that writes up a to-do list and then promptly forgets all about it. I've tried pen & paper, PDAs, etc and all have failed. What I _have_ wanted, though, was an easy way to remind myself about events and tasks. That's what Naggly will do. No lists to manage. No tasks to mark complete. Just an easy to use and flexible reminder service. I have plans to provide some of the same integration paths as RTM namely Google Calendars, Apple's iCal, and instant messaging.

    @jesus - Because websites cost money? And maybe I might want to make a few bucks doing this? Seriously though, I will be open sourcing some of the libraries I'll be writing but the app itself will remain closed.
  • Why not write some open source software?
  • Susan Hannum
    Let me know if you want help - gratis, for you :-)
  • Ditto! This is going to be interesting to watch evolve.

    Have you seen http://rememberthemilk.com ? Any upgrades in mind?
  • Good luck!
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