Overlooking the Tobin Bridge
October 3rd 2007
I’m staying in Boston working on my new startup with my business partner, who has a luxurious and geeked out condo here. Boston is a very interesting city. It’s completely different from what I’m used to, the young frontier of San Francisco and Berkeley. There’s a more mature feel to it for some reason, like everyone knows it’s been around for a really long time and they’re proud of it. Or maybe I’ve just been eating at too many upscale restaurants, I’m not sure.
Tonight we ate at a nice little pub in Harvard square called Grafton Street, so I’m practically a namesake. As a matter of fact, though, I’m more of a namesake than the Harvard grads – the names “Harvard” and “Harward” both came from “Here-weard”, old English for “army warden” (thanks to Tara for finding that out for me!). Clearly, “Harward” is closer to the original. I’m glad I didn’t go to Harvard or I would have a hell of a time not being a pretentious prick by explaining that to people every chance I got.
I haven’t done the history tours yet, but I’m really looking forward to it. Even driving around the streets here feels like a history tour, and it’s really cool to be in the middle of it for a bit, even if I am working most of the time.
Development is going fast—we started 4 months ago in Java EE and the Java Server Faces framework, but found it didn’t meet our needs to produce a truly rich user interface with a reasonable amount of effort. More on that later.
Two (working) weeks ago we evaluated our options and switched to Adobe Flex with a Ruby on Rails backend. In two weeks we had caught up with our previous Java prototype and we’ve seen major progress this week beyond our expectations. We’re a lot happier working in Flex and Rails (me especially, being a UI snob and all) and much more efficient too.
I have a few posts I’ve been meaning to write on why we chose the platforms we did. I will surely get to them this week, so stay tuned.
On top of that, we’re making great progress on Zenphoto! I’m sure you’re all happy to hear that finally. Version 1.1 is almost out the door, and it will be the first non-beta feature-complete version of Zenphoto, with tons of new features, bug fixes, speed improvements, and more. It’s looking and working great and staying as simple and elegant as it was from day one. I’d like to thank the whole team for their hard work in making this happen, and all the Zenphoto users out there for being so patient. I’m really impressed with how it’s coming together in a true open source manner.
So, back to Boston – the time change is very annoying. I’m trying to wake up early, but it’s hard to get to bed early enough too. And there’s always something else to do, it never stops. So I had better get to sleep on East Coast time, in my sofa bed in an office walled in whiteboards and computer monitors. Goodnight 
Here-weard… but yay, you remembered! That’s so cute. I’m reading right now, The Voyage of St. Brendan. It’s pretty good. I miss you, I’m glad you’re having a good time in Boston!
Sounds like a geek’s dream!
See you Saturday, fellow tourist…
This is very, very exiting. I’m gonna do everything I can to promote Zenphoto once 1.1 is out. This software absolutely needs to get the noteriety and respect it deserves. Thanks for coming up with this whole crazy thing.
Sounds great! I greatly look forward to the release of 1.1. I have been using the bloated Gallery2 for the last year or so and let me tell you that I do NOT like Gallery2 that much.
In any case, great work on ZenPhoto. Do you know approximately when ZP 1.1 will be released? I look forward to it!
Welcome to Boston. This is the perfect time to be here, just in time for fall. It’s a wonderful old city, and SO much to do. Looking forward to ZenPhoto 1.1
RE: ZenPhoto team
What about everyone who has contributed patches to the main trunk in the past? If you’re going to have a contributors list, it should be complete.
It is in fact a Wiki, please add yourself! That’s what everyone else did actually, I just moderate it to make sure there aren’t any errors.
Feel free, and sorry for not crediting you for whatever you did in the past.
I figured that was some official “core” team. Honestly, without being able to view the old bug tracker, I have no idea which of my (few) patches made it in.
Are you still in Boston? There are several Flash platform users groups (two of which I attend) that would likely be very interested in hearing about what you are doing with Flex and RoR. Let me know if you are still here and interested – I could put you in contact with the guys that administer those groups. They are always looking for speakers! Lots of good Flash/Flex developers in this city it turns out, and lots of enthusiasm for learning more.
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