Josh Kendall

New Business

I’ve talked about it a bit, but I wanted to talk about the new business I’m starting in depth. I’m starting a web and iOS development company with my brother, our focus is on clean, easy to use applications. I’ve always preferred an easy to use simplistic application over a beautifully designed one where the interface is confusing. My web site is a perfect example of this, I find 99% of content management systems to be overly complex. Instead of using one of them, I opted to run my site on Jekyll. Jekyll lets me do what I want without getting in the way, sure it doesn’t use a database or have a nifty web accessible new post/page form, but I don’t need those features. Not using a database reduces my server load and my having to do a weekly database backup. Not having a web form for new pages means I can’t post something really quick, I have to write it out and then decide if I should publish it. All of my recent posts have actually been written in Day One on an iPad.

For this business I’m taking on the role of Director of Software Development which allows me to focus on the actual project development, future developers/designers and everything server related. My brother Justin will be taking on the role of Director of Projects which lets him focus on client interaction, our social media interactions and keeping projects on time and budget. He will also be prioritizing/handling support emails and handling contracts/estimates.

With this business we’re trying to focus on doing at most a dozen client projects per year while also launching our own projects every few months. We’re currently working on the paperwork for the LLC so I’m not going to tell you the name yet as it might not be the final name we use but if everything works out with it we should be launched and accepting projects around the week of the 21st.

Switching Hosts

Short of one single hiccup with provisioning I’ve loved using Rackspace’s cloud servers, but recently I’ve moved all of my sites over to MediaTemple. I decided to do this as I wanted VPS hosting for my new business and I didn’t want to pay for, nor manage sites on two services. The plus of this is that all of my standard LAMP packages are already installed so I don’t have to worry about security because I know it’s been setup by people who have done this more than I have and who do it for a living. This means if I have an issue I can send a support request to MT and they will handle it, with Rackspace I was the support staff fore most things since I installed everything except the OS.

I still love Rackspace and will use them when I feel the problem requires it. Istill recommend them if you want total control of everything, I just needed to not have to worry about servers when I should be focusing on the new business and the changes that come with it.

Goodbye Android

After dealing with the hassle of working with various versions of the Android OS and the multitude of devices that all seem to react different to the same code or layouts even when they have the same screen resolution, I’ve decided to no longer develop for that platform. I will still be supporting existing clients Android projects, but will no longer be accepting new ones.

This decision isn’t something I’ve thought about lightly, with the extra effort required to create Android based projects I feel that it would be best to focus that effort on more client iOS applications as well as my own. This has largely been made because of the amount of issues I’ve encountered over the last year on projects, the amount of time it takes to complete a project is usually twice as long as the iOS counterpart and since I’m starting a new business effort can be focused elsewhere.

Now on Bootstrap

If you’ve seen my website in the last few months you can clearly see it once again looks different. I’ve decided to drop my custom design that I’ve never been happy with and start fresh using Twitter’s Bootstrap toolkit and their example “Hero” layout. I wanted to stay on Jekyll and I wanted something easy to read, Bootstrap meets those goals and has given me a solid starting point for customization. Bootstrap has been so easy to implement that it’s likely going to be the starting point for all of my projects.

With the new site comes some content changes, old posts have been reformatted and have shorter titles to fit the new design. I’m also going to try and post more often on development topics as well as general business topics as I start my new company.