Derek and I competed (and sponsored) the Rails Day 2006 competition.

We successfully built and deployed an application we call Heartbeat in 24 hours.

Yes, you heard that right, 24 hours. We started at midnight on June 16, and ended at 11:59 pm. We got a little bit of sleep, and yes, my butt still hurts from sitting at the computer all day, but we built an amazing application.

Here are some screen shots:

And here are some stats (and our commit log — notice how my commit comments are crazy, and got crazier the closer to finishing and yet Derek’s are always nice and concise):

http://spectate.railsday2006.com/changesets/teams/107/

Rails Day 2006 was a blast, and we look forward to sponsoring and competing in the years to come!

As many of you know, I’ve been deploying quite a few Ruby on Rails apps lately — to shamelessly plug a few, there’s Meople (a db/app server and web server setup), some personal sites (my own server) and quite a few Highgroove Studios client’s sites.

When I first started “helping” Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios a long time ago to deploy Rails applications, we were learning along with the big providers. We survived the pre-1.0 Rails days (0.13, 0.14 !) and some crazy Apache and lighttpd setups. We’ve come a long way, from the days of shared hosting and the wonderful resources at TextDrive, DreamHost, and other hosting providers. We’ve since moved on to deploying on our own servers, dedicated and co-located for complete control. Along the way we’ve contributed to many guides, pages, and the community — most importantly, many of the pages on the Official Ruby on Rails wiki. Most notably, we’ve learned a few tricks or two about hosting business-class apps that demand serious attention to detail.

We’re ready to give back to the community, and provide a much needed service. We’d like to introduce Slingshot Hosting - specialized Ruby on Rails Business Hosting for Serious Applications. (more…)

Welp, Jodi and I finally tied the knot!

We were married on June 3, 2006 — the ceremony and reception were just awesome, and yes, I’m biased, but everything was just perfect:  perfect weather, the perfect guests, perfect music, perfect food, and oh, yes, the perfect bride.

Pictures are coming soon, I’ll be gallery-izing them so anyone can order prints.  We have already gathered some from friends and family and will be including those.

Stay Tuned for pics!