A New Company is Born
When Rick and I started working together on Mephisto about a year ago, we barely knew each other. During the process of working on Mephisto we come to learn that our development styles and processes were practically identical. Put simply, we worked well together.
During the course of that year, we also toyed with other ideas, even the idea of starting a company. Neither one of us had any experience getting a company up and running, so we put it on the back burner and continued to work on a couple applications we had in the works, including Mephisto.
Nearing the release of our first product, we've finally made our business official. We're now officially Active Reload, LLC. and it couldn't feel better! It's been an interesting ride and a great learning experience forming a company and we're grateful for the help we've received from our friends. We'd especially like to thank Stephen Rainey of Clearfunction for all his advice and help with setting up the business. We'd also like to thank the guys at Engine Yard for sponsoring our first product and helping us get off the ground with their excellent support and servers. We're looking forward to really rocking the house with Engine Yard.
Lighthouse, Our first product coming soon
We've been working like a Ninja at Killacon getting Lighthouse, our issue and bug tracking system ready for launch. We created Lighthouse to help us manage all the development projects we have going, including Mephisto.
While there are many other bug tracking systems available, none of them really sat well with us. We wanted to bring a new approach to an old practice. One of our main focuses with Lighthouse is to allow you to stay in the context of what you're doing. If you're checking your email, and someone asks you about a feature, or reports a bug (which happens frequently), wouldn't it be nice if you could just email your bug tracker directly? It's possible with Lighthouse, and we have more tricks up our sleeves like this too.
What if you're out cruising the town and you're mysteriously hit by a meteorite that helps you solve a design problem you've been working on for ages? After you shake off the undeniable pain from being struck by a meteorite, you could pop open your cell phone's email application and post a ticket (then proceed immediately to the hospital).
We'll be blogging more about our thoughts on tracking development, and how we plan to tackle the issues that we face on an almost daily basis. We'll also be releasing a few libraries/plugins for Rails over the next week.
Smash and Grab February 27th
We're gonna send out 30 or so random invites on February 27th for a week of beta fab fever to those who signup for our notification ! We'll try to wrap this up by March 6th and have Lighthouse ready for public consumption.
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Active Reload is a small company founded by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer. Rick is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, while Justin is a member of the Prototype Javascript Library core team. Together we build rocking software with a focus on awesomeness.
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Beautifully simple issue tracking. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.
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Web-based Subversion Interface Manage Subversion permissions and browse through your changesets and files with ease. Warehouse takes the complicated and mundane tasks of Subversion and makes it easy.
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We've changed the way you manage your blog. With a beautiful interface, multi-site support, and infinitely extendible through plugins, Mephisto is a fresh take on what a blogging application should be.
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May29permalink
Read your tweets for messages prefixed with @foo and post to that user. http://pastie.caboo.se/65927
# Read tyler-durden's tweets for any messages starting with '@project-mayhem' # # $ ruby twitter_bot.rb tyler-durden project-mayhem my-password # # Stores the last modified and highest id in a yaml file in the pwd by the anme of 'twitter_bot.cache' # Should block against dupes and be easy against twitter's servers -
May17permalink
Displaying nice relative dates
<%= relative_time(Time.now) %> # today <%= relative_time(1.day.ago) %> # yesterday <%= relative_time(1.day.from_now) %> # tomorrow <%= relative_time_span([Time.now, 5.days.from_now]) %> # May 17th - 22nd -
May16permalink
Rick: no more lightbox? Justin: no, I banished it because it was useless the way it was being used. Rick: ha, it was cool man Justin: yeah, Zune music sharing is cool too. Rick: touche -
May10
Scrobbler: Last.fm for Ruby —Ruby Library for accessing the AudioScrobbler web service.
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Discussion
Congrats, guys!
I’m looking forward to seeing some great projects come out of this.
If I had the cash…no doubt in my mind I’d call you two first for the 21345457 apps I think up and don’t have time (or the brains) to do.
Mad props on getting this off the ground!
This just had to happen; there’s too much talent between the two of you to not form a profitable ninja coding team.
Congratulations and the best of luck!
Congrats guys. I look forward to see your work.
Beating such great projects such as Bugzilla will be a tough one ;)
In all seriousness, JIRA is a good product, so I look forward to see what you can come up with that goes above and beyond.
Cheers,
Dion Almaer
Dang, what a powerful combination of talent and creativity. I definitely can’t wait to see what projects you guys pull out of that magic hat. By the way, congrats on the release of lighthouse, its quite astounding.
Awesome! I’m sure you will do well.
And I love the “budget” pulldown on the contact form.!
Congrats!
Design looks great and I know the code probably is too.
Congratulations and best of luck! Lighthouse sounds great!
Congrats on getting the new company going guys. Looking forward to lighthouse.
Fantastic guys. I know you’ll do well. I just recently found a fantastic partner as well.
awesome, this will be one of my daily sites i will be visiting daily. all of the hard work in mephisto, beast, and all the plugins are really helping me out thanks!
Kool, and best of luck to you both.
Hey, glad you got it all running! Now we can finally see (soon ^^) lighthouse. I have been eagerly awaiting it for a while.
Frank
Thanks for the kind words everyone. I hope you all enjoy it, Justin and I are having a blast building it :)
Best of luck to both of you… Will be a steady reader of your most interesting posts about the startup :D
I just think it rocks that you guys used “emergence day” in the screenshots. GoW nerds! Congrats/Good Luck though.
I would like to sell marble statues.
Are you aware there is already an issue tracking product called Lighthouse?
Hans,
Yes, we have recently been made aware of it and are working it out as we speak. :-)
Theres been a coldfusion issue tracker called Lighthouse out for awhile now
http://lighthousepro.riaforge.org/