Interesting write up. I was just watching a video yesterday which had a pretty good example of the testing aircraft manufacturers do for this scenario. It’s called a velocity minimum unstick test. Some impressive flying.
It really is a great place and I can vouch that so much of it stems from the founder Andrew. He’s one of the most unselfish, generous and real people I’ve ever met. I’ve been through some major ups and downs with the team and even under extreme pressure he never changed. It bleeds through to all of us.
The back deck is fantastic. I didn’t say it in the article but it gets better. It’s in North Bondi, only a minutes walk from the beach! Nothing like a quick dip between reviewing PRs!
Actually ART runs DEX bytecode not JVM bytecode so I'd argue it's not a JVM at all. By your definition anything that can translate Java to an intermediate representation is a JVM. Does that make LLVM a JVM?
Currently running Ubuntu 12.10 on a brand new HP Envy 4 Ultrabook. Everything works just fine, but I had to use Boot Repair and turn off secure boot in the BIOS before Grub would show at boot.
Haha that reminds me of a similar hack we discoverd as kids. Australian payphones had an interesting feature where you could place a call without paying however the call would hangup almost immediately upon being answered. There was a split second where you could actually hear each other so we'd usually yell something out and our parents would know it was us waiting to be picked up from the beach or some such.
This is a shameless plug but I've created a service that aims to help with a lot of the issues that OP describes such as rate limiting, JS and scaling. It's a bit like Heroku for web scraping and automation. It's still in beta but if anyone is interested then check out http://tubes.io.
Thanks for sharing the numbers. Great to see the process by which you worked out how much it was costing you. Good wakeup call really. Shame it took you so long to cotton on.
I didn't know about rails asset management (I'm more of a django guy), thanks I'll look into it.
I really like your description of it as a package manager. In those terms I'm starting to think more like an app store for your web site.
My thinking was more around a company setting where you've got change control processes in place and deployments perhaps aren't as easy to orchestrate/are too much effort.
Then there's my personal itch which is that for every product I build I seem to be doing the same things over and over again with Olark, Woopra, Google Analytics etc.
Suggest all Aussie startups check out http://www.startmate.com.au/ they're doing heaps to build the startup community back in Oz as well as forming strong ties to the US. They've just opened their 2011 intake.
Startmate was a massive help to us at Chorus (http://www.getchorus.com). With their help we launched our product and successfully flipped our company up to the US. Today we're operating out of Mountain View, CA.
My co-founder and I were just bitching about that this morning. It's unreasonably difficult to send money to people in the land of capitalism...
Even worse is most of the 'innovation' in the banking sector seems to be pointed at making old systems less painful (e.g. cashing checks via MMS etc.). Why not just eliminate them altogether? Major opportunity for disruption if you can overcome some pretty deep and wide moats.