I’ve been working on some cool stuff for the last six months.  One thing about being the boss is that I get to call the shots on the technology that we use.  I chose Rails 3, MongoDB, and PusherApp for our service.

Rails 3 is awesome.  A really big step forward I think.  I’m also running on Ruby 1.9.2. This combo has really made development fast and easy.  I find myself writing hashes the Javascript way, {symbol:value}. I like it.

MongoDB using Mongoid has been really nice to work with.  I originally wanted to use CouchDB but the Rails support just isn’t that great.  I gave it a second try in another project but still it’s not as complete as Mongoid.  Also not having to do migrations is awesome.  It just works.  It took some time to figure out a few things, and Mongoid kept changing along the way, but the latest 2.0 version is pretty solid.

PusherApp saved my life.  If I had to write the socket stuff for this auction, it would have taken another three months.  Pusher is a direct drop in and go solution.  Even when Heroku went down, Pusher was still up and running.  I’m using Pusher to push updates to the clients during the auction.  It is also used for our chat system.  I love it.

I started with everything running on Heroku, but when they went down I moved the whole thing to Linode.  It took me like three hours to do and I was back up and running.  I was able to get a lot more speed out of the system on Linode.  Local MongoDB running and now Resque is really fast.  So fast that I’m sticking with Linode for now.  I tried to use the new CloudFoundry but my app would not run on their platform.  Not sure why.  I think in the future I’m going to install CloudFoundry.org on my own Linodes and have my own cloud servers.

So now that the Auction app is done I’ve been working on another car app for a guy in the Bay Area.  I’m using Rails3, MongoDB, Resque, and Linode.  To me it seems to be a winning stack. I have about 80 hours development into it so far and I’m just over halfway done.  I’m going to try to finish it this weekend

So, what’s next?  I don’t know.  I don’t have anything scheduled.  But next week I’ll be looking again.  If anyone needs a Rails 3.1 app… I’d be happy to go for it!