This text is based on a comment I read in HackerNews but I adapted to my own version which expresses my feelings about Steve’s death.

Considering how apparent it was that Steve’s health was gravely bad and rapidly deteriorating, we all in the back of our minds knew the time we had him in this world was limited and precious. So it comes as a complete shock to me how upset I actually am by Steve’s passing.

Even though most of us never knew him, we all feel as if we did know him very well; his inventions, complete labours of love, have become so central to how we live our lives. The profound impact his creations have had on us cannot make us feel any other way.

I remember when I bought my first Mac. It was completely worth it because purchasing that machine literally changed my life.

Without a computer that was an absolute joy to use, I would have never spent so many hours having pleasure while coding and consequently now have the career opportunities that I do.

I feel eternally indebted to Steve, despite having never met the man myself. By creating the wonderful tools he did for us to work with, I feel he is significantly responsible for the career I have today.

To one of the few that can say ‘I changed the world’, thank you.

Rest in peace Steve!

Interesting talk on UX from Google I/O 2010

For the curious: Yes, Slicehost is one of our strongest competitors for sure. But, more than simply competitors they’re also our colleagues, friends and even more imporantly, we value how they helped shape the market we see today. This is a tribute to them for their contribution and great work.

When Slicehost started selling their VPS product back in 2006 I was starting my first company where we did a ton of hosting for enterprise customers, which is no doubt is a very different world from the world that Webbynode exists today. This world was started to get defined by companies such as Slicehost.

Slicehost was one of the first to actually come out and challenge the rules of the “all you can eat” hosting providers by offering a concise and very well focused product, for developers. In reality, they did great a great job, Matt and Jason were smart enough to work together in order to make Slicehost a very ‘personal’ company that you could work with and get all your answers not from some boring guy in a tie, but you’d get an answer from a person just like you, a developer.

Some great stuff from Matt & Jason:

• Hacking Cashflow
• What’s up with the wait list?
• 3 way handshake Ep1
• Slicehost Podcast
• 10k slices and more

Earlier this year I met Matt, and since then he’s become basically an advisor to us. He and I see very eye to eye about what a hosting company for developers should be. In general, we understand the same principles of offering more than simply a barebones product, and offering a service along with it and in general doing the extra steps to get stuff done for customers. This all falls into the same concept of how the small Italian Restaurant is gonna care more than the big ‘brand-chain’ restaurant and usually give you a better quality product.

What’s Matt and Jason up to?

I never personally met Jason, but from what I know he moved to Texas to work with Rackspace after their acquisition. Matt is doing some rad work doing his own investments and also some very cool projects such as DevStructure, its a tool that lets you reverse engineer the setup in a server and generate configurations for Chef and Puppet.

We want to offer our best wishes to the Slicehost founders, and all the guy who worked there to make it to the great successes they had.

So you want some stickers eh?

Good news. We received a shipment of brand new Webbynode stickers just today. They’re fresh out of the oven. These high quality stickers are printed on sheets of thick, glossy vinyl.

I know everyone wants to get their hands on these babies, so here’s what we will do to make it fair. For ONE WEEK only we will send stickers to anyone who asks.

For anyone outside the USA, don’t worry we’ll send these anywhere in the world. Just make sure to include your full address. I will literally copy and paste what you fill out in the form.

• If you’re running a conference or usergroup and love Webbynode and you want to give everyone a sticker, let me know and I can arrange to send you as many as you need.

You have until 26th of April 10pm EST Friday 29th of April 10pm EST to make your request, so don’t delay!

Enjoy your Webbynode stickers

Edit: We are not requiring a blog post any longer, we’ll just give them out until they run out.

Update:Submissions closed We’ll be sending out all the stickers shortly. We’re ordering a new batch because we had a lot more entries than stickers. Thanks everyone!

With the launch of our new website, we wanted to revamp the forums, we explored many options to push our community to integrate. However, the more complex the ‘community’ the least we liked the idea.

In the end we decided to go with Reddit as our community, its already wildly used by our customers, its easy to use and we think it will make a difference in the way our community interacts.

So lets get started!

Visit:
Webbynode’s Community

We have been working for a while on our node.js rapid deployment engine and we just made it widely available. It’s still considered beta, because it’s only supported in servers running Rapp with nginx, but that will change soon. Update: We now support Apache as well and we’re moving out of beta real soon.

Our approach is to use git to transfer and manage the application files, along with a few more things. When you first push a node.js application to your server, we install and configure node.js and its dependencies, along with monit and npm (node.js package manager).

We then setup an upstart script, making sure your app is started when you reboot. This script also allows you to stop and start your application at will.

Another optional thing we do is configure nginx to proxy your requests. This way you can serve multiple node.js applications on port 80, while the real server is running on an alternate port like 8080, 8081, etc.

All this enables you to deploy, manage and delete all your node.js applications and its dependencies from the command line.

Below is a screencast that walks you through the process of deploying a simple node.js application. The documentation is available in our Webbynode Guides, here.