Utah Tech Spotlight

Utah Tech Spotlight Events

Bungee… tighten the belt and re-tool

  • Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Aug 28

I wanted to post a follow up to the last few posts I have done on Bungee Labs.  This week Bungee let go fifteen people (which I believe is about half of the company.)  As I had said in my previous posts, the real question (or one of them) for a company like Bungee is the level to which they can get developers to adopt their language and use their tool.  Well,  it would appear that the answer is: not as fast as hoped, expected, or needed.

The plan appears to knuckle down, re-tool, make the platform more solid, and develop some compelling apps.

Good luck to them… trying to get developers to adopt a different language is about like trying to do religious conversions.  Hopefully inventing the “Killer App” is easier.

Followup: Bungee Review

  • Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Aug 25

Okay, so a few weeks ago I headed down to Bungee labs to have a look-see at what they are up to.  Specifically, the event was their Skunk Works, wherein we got to see projects built by ten different teams in their spare time.  The average time spent seemed to be somewhere between a couple of evenings, and a week or so.

So for starters, the apps were cool.  The fact that people were able to pull of what they were in such short time lines was really impressive.  What was even cooler was what was beneath the surface that people really didn’t need to worry about.  The cross-browser compatibility, and things like that which is just pretty much taken care of for you.

I think the key for Bungee really seems to be in looking at what types of applications it is the best fit for.  You are paying to license a server, so for it to really make sense you should probably be considering it in fairly large projects where you would be considering other pay-to-play application servers.  I have had some exposure to some of these in the past, most notably Dynamo, and the toolkits and resources they make available can be nice time savers.

This means that it probably makes a bit less sense on a  small project with a single person working on it, and that doesn’t really need to be concerned with great uptime, patchability, CVS, and the like.

This is further reinforced by its tremendous speed in bringing new developer resources online with the whole dev environment, CVS, and everything available instantly.  This would be awesome if you had a large team working on a project.

Additionally, the tools realistically probably cut project dev times roughly in half from what I can tell.

One question is how it stacks up to other App Severs from a performance perspective.  I don’t really know that yet.

So if you were kicking off large project, using half a dozen or more developers, planned for it to take 9 months or so to get done, and really don’t care what language it’s in… then I think this is really a good potential fit you should explore.

Although, now that I think about it… once you had such an environment in place, I think whipping out small projects would be light-speed.  The key is that initial justification for the App Server I think.

To succeed though, Bungee needs to have the developers already familiar enough with it that they want to use it.  That’s where the free environment that Bungee runs is such a good idea.  It would be interesting to see Bungee expand their skunk works contests and incent those outside of Bungee to play.  Maybe we even expand this a little bit, and see what doing the same project in and out of Bungee looks like, and what the timelines are… What do you say Bungee?  I’ll help put this together.

As a final note, I want to comment on something outside of Bungee’s technology, and that is their culture. Even more than being impressed with the applications, how cool they were, and how quickly they were written, I was really struck by the people.  These are people who love where they work.  They love the team, the environment, and what they are trying to accomplish.  One of the most important things that a company can do is build a velvet-rope type environment, where people are wondering, “how do I get in there?”  Bungee has done that.  Their internship programs that bring it some of the most talented people in the country (where they are competing with the likes of Google and Microsoft for these student’s interest), the movies they show for free to locals, the parties, and the obvious approachability of the management team is really just stunning to see.  When it comes to culture, these guys get it.  Whatever else Bungee is or is to become, it’s obviously one heck of a place to work.

How Cool is Bungee Jumping?

  • Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Aug 11

Of course, I mean Bungee Labs, not actual Bungee jumping with a massive band tied to my heels… Sorry to let down all of you who might be convinced it would break :)

So how cool is Bungee labs and their Bungee Connect solution?  I don’t know… but I’m gonna find out.

I had a chance to spend some time with the a few of the Bungee crew and talk at length about their vision.  It sounds pretty cool.  Basically it’s a “sandbox”, similar to how a JVM or an App server sort of protect you and the environment from each other, and they do a lot of the dirty work you don’t want to, and make certain resources available to you.

Only they take it further…

They give you your IDE, your tools and dev environment, CVS, a simple way to roll out a test environment, etc.  This is all deployed on their servers (or more appropriately Amazon S3 servers) instantly.  So basically you do “add developer”, and SHAZAM you’re literally ready to run in no time.  Plus, your production or test environments can run out on the S3… they handle all of that. They also have the option to license and run it inside you own environment if you need to.  I’d love to see them add Bug tracking as well (they have plans for this in the future).

All in all it sounds really cool.  It really is taking the concept of outsourcing, and of using various resources much more in an “object” like mentality to the next level.

The concern however, is that it does require using their own language.  Okay, so this might be a concern, or depending on the language, it might be an opportunity.  Will developers adopt it?  Is it powerful enough?  Can they develop quickly?

These are some of the questions that Bungee will be helping to make clear to us all during an exciting event they have planned this week: The Bungee Skunk Day.

This will allow 10 teams of developers to showcase what they have been able to develop in Bungee Connect.  Want to see what it can do?  Here’s your chance.

Bungee has given me the opportunity to come down and be one of the judges for this event.  I couldn’t be more pleased.  I am excited to see the fruits of their labors.  Additionally, I will be doing a writeup ere of what I thought of the event, the apps, and Bungee in general.

I hope to see you there!  Here are the official details from Bungee:

At SkunkDay, Bungee employee show off different web apps that they have been building on our platform, Bungee Connect. Some of the apps may be very cool. Some may be quite funny. Many will be extremely geeky.

Yes, there will be refreshments. Yes, there will be food. Yes, it’s a great excuse to get out of the office (I suggest, “I’m heading out on a very important research mission on web technologies, chief!”). And, yes, you will get to enjoy the ambience of basement auditorium of an Orem-based, late 80’s business park.

The event begins at 2:30 p.m. on August 13. After a short reception, the cabaret-style show begins.

So, put it on your calendar right now. Feel free to bring along any developers and techie-geeks you would like. And please, RSVP on the Facebook Event (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=19414984919), or by emailing brittany@bungeelabs.com so that we can get an accurate count of people who plan to attend.