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.
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