I'm Dan. I write, code and manage stuff to do with the internet. I am Technical Director at 3ev, a web dev agency and cloud hosting consultancy in London and Hove, UK.
Since some sysadmin told me installing ImageMagick on a server was "non-trivial", I've been determined to find easier and trivial ways of making stuff happen.
A sometime opinionated member of the TYPO3 community, I now spend a lot of time writing for the internet press on cloud, ruby and web development.
Before I fell into building bits of the internet, I studied Electronic Publishing at City University, London. And before that I studied Music with particular interest in Xenakis's use of sieve theory.
You can find my words in Linux Magazine, Linux Format and Dot Net pretty often. You'll find them on blogs and scattered around other corners of the internet now and again.
Here are some of the things I've written...
We go beyond the press release and beyond the tutorial to find out a little bit about what makes some of these stuff-as-a-service services go.
...it’s very easy to take your eye off the meter, fire up dozens of services, store gigabytes of files, and end up spending a fortune.
All the tutorials you'll find refer to downloading the generated private key from the AWS console. This is fine for the first 10 times you create instances or cloud setups, but the time will come when you want to use the same key for lots of instances or you want to use your own keys all the time.
...in the move to cloud, you have to be prepared to unlearn everything you know about hosting.
Dealing with failure means you have to be able to bring back the entire environment on a different infrastructure, and do it easily.
With the move to cloud computing, particularly cloud hosting, developers often opt for infrastructure as a server rather than PaaS. Why would you go PaaS?
The web dev’s intro to the cloud, Improve performance on the cloud, Scaling on the cloud, Moving onto the cloud...
To kick off this series, I thought I'd look at how you go about breaking your cloud setup once everything seems to be running nicely
Techniques for using AWS - SQS and EC2 - using ruby.
Google App Engine enables you to build scalable apps without worrying about scaling details. Here is how to get your first cloud app off the ground.
Git. The best thing ever to happen in programming. Intro tutorial covering how it works and where all the magic is.
Want your own personal, huge Linux cluster to throw your worst and most exciting problems at? Big computing is now really cheap...
Things had changed in GWT. We look at the changes, what can be done and the new power of building JS with Java. Reprinted in Google special edition.
I started blogging this year (2001) on cloud, scaling, platforms for Admin Network & Security
For most programmers, deployment is an area that could do with a touch of laziness. Deploying to a cluster – or even one machine – can be repetitive and tiring. Enter Capistrano, a Ruby deployment tool that makes the task of deploying an application to servers easier but running defined tasks for you on the remote servers.
I have lost many days, weeks, possibly even months to JavaScript. The rise of JavaScript frameworks (prototype, mootools etc) over the past couple of years, and their increasing stability has helped. GWT looks like the next evolution in JavaScript development – instead of writing in JavaScript, write in Java.
Running sites on EC2 is easy, but really making use of the scalability and flexibility of cloud computing requires a new approach.
Running sites on EC2 is easy, but really making use of the scalability and flexibility of cloud computing requires a new approach.
How we mashed Flickr, YouTube and a bunch of other services together and got the band updating the site with SMS
Intro and tutorial on Akelos, a port of Ruby on Rails to PHP
Overview of the various Web 2.0 frameworks that are available – e.g. scriptaculous, mootools...
Intro and tutorial on the new Canvas tag for drawing in HTML pages.
Technical Director at 3ev.
Reach me via twitter @danfrost
See what I've been up to on LinkedIn
This Week in Dan (TWiD) is the noise I find and some of the goodness within it
My Biog
Words I have written and someone has published