Fri, July 4, 2008 - 3:14 AM
The Sun shines on Tribe.net
Yesterday, 5:22 PM
So, today I basically got the go-ahead to go full speed ahead with the rewrite project. I have convinced management that I know how to scale Ruby on Rails, and with John Adams (one of our contractors) now working on twitter.com (one of my favorite websites which also happens to be 100% RoR) I should have a wealth of data coming back for the bleeding edge development we are doing.
I think you folks should get not only the most stable but the shiniest and the coolest toys to play with, since SOME of you are paying for it. Because of this, I've entered into talks with Sun and MySQL to run the next version of tribe.net on nothing but Sun Microsystems equipment with Enterprise level database support. We're also going to be using some bleeding edge technologies like computing clouds to make this as cost efficient as possible. I know this is probably wacky moon talk to more than a few of my friends and people reading it, but these are all good things.
Because of Sun's support for this project, I feel a lot more comfortable pushing the bleeding edge of what can be done. I'm also having fun looking at machines with four processors in them and 256 GB of RAM. That Sun product catalog is a lot like porn to me, except you can't get a PDF sticky. One of the things that I am particularly proud of is throwing tribe's gauntlet into the ring of making Ruby on Rails scalable. I'm not the brightest person on the planet, but it seems like this shouldn't be rocket science. We also have two interns working on Ruby on Rails and AJAX/UI code for us, and you'll probably be thanking them more than me for the minor tweaks that tribe.net has needed for a year or so now.
The new timeline goes a little like this:
Proof of concept (July 9th)
Beta test roll out (August 1st)
Tribe.net 3.0 rollout (September 1st)
Due to certain efficiencies in coding in Ruby on Rails, we may have the beta-test sooner rather than later. Paid subscribers will have the first whack at the new Tribe.net servers, as we're setting up the cluster specifically for them first. Once we have the bugs shaken out, we'll launch the site for all members.
In other words... ask Mark Pincus if you see him at Burning Man!
