HN user

nateaune

13 karma

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/natea; my proof: https://keybase.io/natea/sigs/k6fvSqhwTaK5gzbHwCUowrqhqRdURVLoId5wOmaCOWY ]

Posts2
Comments12
View on HN

Some of us tech entrepreneurs in Boston built this site yesterday to aid in the collection of photos and videos from the Boston Marathon. http://evidenceupload.org

It can be used from a mobile phone to bulk upload photos/videos directly from the phone and preserving all metadata (timestamp, lat/lon coordinates).

We used Filepicker.io for the upload widget, Amazon S3 for the file storage, Heroku for hosting and Ruby on Rails.

Tom Preston, the co-founder of Github had some interesting things to say about the benefits of open sourcing almost everything that the company creates. http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

But a deeper question is what problem are you trying to solve with another PaaS product that is not already served by the likes of Heroku, Dotcloud, Stackato, OpenShift, CloudFoundry, etc?

The last two (OpenShift and CloudFoundry) are already open source PaaS solutions that you can use either on-premise or hosted externally. Read more on my post comparing these four providers. http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-o...

I can tell you from experience that building and supporting a PaaS is a lot of work, and I think it will be difficult to make it sustainable unless you are offering it as a hosted service.

The only other provider that I know that is not offering a hosted PaaS is ActiveState's Stackato, and they have 15 years of experience selling to enterprise customers.

It'll be interesting to see if/when Python/Django support emerges for CloudFoundry. In the meantime, the DjangoZoom PaaS provides automated deployments of your Django app in as little as 30 seconds. Sign up for the private beta and mention that you saw this Hacker News thread to get priority in the queue. http://djangozoom.com

@kilian - we fully intend to polish the UI and make it look nicer, but you're right - we've been focusing on getting the backend working well, as that seems to be the biggest challenge. It could like all nice and pretty but people won't use it if it breaks. Looking forward to getting your feedback when you deploy your Django projects!