ProjectX Blog

Zoomin has grown again.

Tomek Piatek joined us in early December. Tomek manages our development process and is rails developer #3 at Projectx. Tomek recently worked at Weta Digital (the company that does the special effects on King Kong and Lord of the Rings). We’re very happy to have him onboard!

Ross Lin joins us from the University of Otago – where he recently completed his computer science masters. Ross has significant GIS experience and will be working on making our maps better looking and more useful.

It’s going to be a full office next week. 🙂

John and I decided that we need to blog more frequently in 2006.

So here we are!

Most of Projectx has taken a well-deserved fortnight off work over the christmas break – in preparation for our next feature release later this week.

In other news – If you’re interested in New Zealand’s next generation of internet companies – you should join up to NZ 2.0 – hosted by Richard McManus and Nat Torkington.

Projectx is very excited about 2006 and we hope you’ll come along for the ride!

We’re proud to announce that we’ve been accepted into Wellingtons premier business incubator CreativeHQ.

We’ll be moving on down there this weekend. Just in time for the release of our new streetmapping site…

Drumroll please!

We’re proud to annouce that Nick Chapman started working with us this week – he’s writing some of the gnarly ruby extensions for use with our search technology.

Welcome aboard Nick!

Hooray…

We have finally incorporated the company.

On thursday afternoon we signed on the line and had Projectx Ltd incorporated. Sealed with a solemn handshake – the race is now officially on….

I spent a bit of this afternoon setting up the Projectx website. Some of the technologies we used:

The Typo Weblogging system

One of the great things about Typo is that it has support for static pages – so you can use it as a basic Content Management System (CMS). This means we can host both our company website and weblog with one software package.

And the best bit? Typo uses Ruby on Rails.

XHTML and CSS

I’ve been a fan of CSS based design for a long time. Using CSS the layout instructions for projectx.co.nz are only 100 lines of code. It helps that Typo outputs clean xhtml markup.

Hosting

We host all our sites on Linux and use Subversion to manage deployment. Because we’re using Ruby for most of our web applications – we use Lighttpd, a fast and modern webserver that works well for hosting applications on FastCGI.

Ruby, Lighttpd, Linux and Postgresql. It’s the LAMP stack for Web 2.0 companies.

I find I am so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.’

“Red” Redding, Shawshank Redemption

I thought this was a fitting quote to start our company blog. We are very excited to start the journey of building a company from an idea into something big.