I recently signed up for the pro version of nitrous.io since they are phasing out the old version that I used for free. So far I am very pleased. Now you get isolated containers to work in with root access. I use the $15/month version that gives you 1G ram and 20G of disk space for a total of two containers. Since I only use nitrous.io for development, I found it easier just use one container (using the entire 1G ram) and cloning the git projects that I am working on. Some of the things that I particularly like are: The editor built into the web based IDE handles just about all programming languages and file types. There is a separate app than can do two things: sync files between your laptop and your container and also forward ports so you can test run apps in the container and use your local web browser. If you don't want to forward ports, you can use their preview option that opens a new browser tab and lets you test in your browser without any port forwarding. The battery o...

Over the course of a year I spend about 2/3 of my working time consulting for customers and the other 1/3 doing my own projects. I view doing personal projects as a form of continuing education. My last major personal project was my natural language processing (NLP) web service KBSportal.com and at the same time I spent a day writing SleepyBird.us for my wife. The project before those projects was an experiment in a live note taking and scheduling system for consultants ConsultingWith.me which I still use but I have turned off the ability for people to create accounts. I never implemented the sister project ConsultingWith.us . Six years ago my side project was CookingSpace.com which I do still use. For me side projects are a great way to try out new ideas and it is well worth it to me to pass on less interesting consulting gigs to free up enough time for my own stuff. I am in general interested in the combination of knowledge management and NLP and my new side project combines t...

Good news for the people at Heroku (Salesforce just paid 200+ million for the company). This is definitely a kick up for platforms as a service. I have long considered Heroku to be the best platform as a service offering because it is so developer friendly - very different from AppEngine which I would label as "scalability friendly." I had to recently make a decision between developing for Heroku or AppEngine for my new business ideas ( consultingwith.me and consultingwith.us ). Heroku and Ruby on Rails, along with all of the useful plugins and auxiliary services offered by Heroku, make the most agile web application development and deployment story right now. In contrast, developing for AppEngine is a pain in many ways. That said, I think that the new AppEngine SDK and services are a solid improvement and since I hope for more than small scale success the relatively inexpensive hosting costs and automatic scalability of AppEngine won me over (at least for these project...