Tom Markiewicz

I read this article on Mashable (via Fred Wilson’s tweet) and had to post this quote on building web applications:

Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.

It sounds simple, but it’s not; determining a basic human need, like the need to share photos or the need to communicate with short text messages is a hit and miss affair.

… I believe now that in many cases it is better to reduce the number of features to a minimum, open the application up via an API, and let the community build on what you have started. This synergy will make your application far more valuable than it would be if it had all these extra features itself.

37signals, Twitter, and a host of other applications are following this model. With the rapidly changing web landscape, I’m not sure there’s a better strategy when rolling out new applications. In the time it takes to build a feature-rich application, the market may have moved in an entirely different direction.

Read the entire article for their rationale, but I completely believe this is the future of building web apps.

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My friend Thomas Myer has a great article up on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection on Building a Small Business Backup System Using Amazon S3.

When you run a small business, you’re usually running too fast and hard to think about data backups. Then something terrible happens—a hardware failure, an employee or contractor gets sloppy and kills a month’s worth of work—and you realize that you better slow down and figure out a few things.

If you’re like me, you’re not exactly an expert in backup systems. All you know is that you need to have something in place in case of emergency. So you stand there looking out over the yawning precipice of possible solutions. There are USB and FireWire external hard drives, network-attached storage machines, Linux machines you can repurpose as backup machines, thumb drives, and hosting solutions to which you can rsync files. From a distance, they all look pretty much alike, except for maybe price point and storage capacity.

The article covers getting set up with Amazon S3, understanding how the service works, and some PHP to perform the backup.

Another excellent resource once you have an account with Amazon S3 (if you don’t want to roll your own backup scripts) is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a desktop application (Win, Mac, and Linux) that enables you to use Amazon S3 storage as a mapped drive on your computer. Think of it like a USB drive with unlimited storage.

Popularity: 38% [?]