JumpBox Official Blog

It’s like a reverse Agatha Christie novel - the numbers are going up instead of down!  Today our newest team member Steven joins us to help hone our marketing message and tell a better story for JumpBox.  Steven’s trading card reads as follows:

A self-proclaimed social media junkie and technology freak, Steven brings enthusiasm and a fresh marketer’s perspective to the team.  Formerly in his spare time Steven raced go karts and shredded mountains on a snowboard. He now dedicates his attention entirely to his wife, two children and web-based technology. 

We’re excited to have Steven involved and helping us translate the sometimes abstract concepts and features involved into meaningful benefits for our users. Welcome aboard Steven!

So here at work, we’re in the process of developing a new web site for our subscribers. We’ve decided to implement the site atop the SilverStripe Content Management System, as we’ve found it to be incredibly flexible and easy to use. It’s based on a powerful MVC framework that’s written in PHP. We develop mostly on Mac OS X, which includes PHP5 pre-installed, so therefore it should be easy to install, right? Wrong!

Want to install SilverStripe? Sure, drop it in place, it’s just a directory structure, but when you try to access the main page, which generally results in SilverStripe attempting to perform its initial setup, you’re Denied!

Why? Well, first of all, SilverStripe requires MySQL… Not included by default on Mac OS X. So I had to install that. I also had to install the MySQL Admin and MySQL Query tools so that I could create the default SilverStripe database and properly set up its permissions.

Next, SilverStripe requires the GD2 PHP extension. Unfortunately, Mac OS X’s PHP installation includes absolutely none of the common PHP extensions. Have one of the thousands of PHP apps that want to use the PHP SOAP extension out of the box? Can’t! Yep, I found that one out while I was trying to do PHP development using the EC2 SOAP APIs.

Should be easy enough to compile the GD2 extension and install it, right? No Way! Building GD2 from a standard PHP download requires a bunch of dependencies that aren’t installed by default on Mac OS X, and then when you finally do get it built and add it to your PHP.ini, it still doesn’t work. So how about MacPorts? Why should I have to install PHP from MacPorts if PHP is already installed?! Even worse, I’d have to reconfigure Apache to use the MacPorts PHP5 install instead of the default. Bleck!

Long story short, I wasted over an hour of my time trying to get the Mac OS X PHP install to bend to my will with absolutely no luck. Then I realized something. I work for JumpBox… We actually have a JumpBox for SilverStripe. It took me about ten seconds to download the JumpBox, another ten to uncompress the Zip file, and yet another ten seconds to start up the SilverStripe VM. After that, I had to fill out a couple of fields for the initial setup, and was good to go. Yes, people, it took under a minute to get a working SilverStripe system up and running.

Even better, instead of having to go through the headache of installing SilverStripe, MySQL, and the missing Mac OS X PHP extensions all over again on my MacBook (so that I can work at home, of course), all I had to do was suspend the VM, copy the JumpBox for SilverStripe folder onto my 5gb thumb drive and throw it in my pocket. Try doing that with your average everyday install.

Okay, “belated b-day,” (it was yesterday).  Two years ago we founded the company with the goal of dramatically simplifying server software.  We postulated that if it were made easy enough, people would find innovative uses and ways to leverage it more in their daily lives.  We saw a sea of Open Source applications that were extremely powerful but prohibitively complex, and therefore a ton of opportunity to simplify how they could be managed.  
 

Two years later we like to think that we’ve put a sizable dent in the problem. And while we have a long way to go towards achieving our vision of supreme usability and flexibility, it’s good to celebrate where we’re at. If you follow this blog, thanks for tracking JumpBox developments.  We promise to continue to work towards making server software easier and more useful and we look forward to your continued input to enable us to produce products and services that simplify your life.

Everyone give a big welcome to our two newest team members at JumpBox, David and Tom.

Their trading cards read as follows:

David is the reason you see so few bugs in our products. He’s the Q & A master who puts each app through its paces to ensure it’s squeaky clean and free of any annoyances. David’s been working contract for us for a few months and just recently joined us full-time. David reads more books than most lawyers do and we’re told the Library of Congress now pales in comparison to the shelves in his den alone. Read more from David on Twitter.

Tom joins JumpBox today bringing a wealth of software engineering and architecture knowledge. In his former life, Tom had worked with Kimbro to write an entire native XML database engine from scratch (dbXML). Tom is the guy who will be responsible for advancing the capabilities of the JumpBox platform and performing (what will appear to the rest of the world as) software magic. Tom is an active local musician in Phoenix and plays in a local post-punk band called “Glamour Shot.” Read more from Tom on his blog.

We’re looking forward to David’s continued merciless bug squashing and Tom’s software super powers to make the JumpBox experience even better for you, our users.

It’s always nice to put faces with names. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the people behind JumpBox:
 
(and yes, to confirm the rumor, JumpBoxes are indeed made of plywood- that’s the secret ingredient behind their stellar usability…)
If we had trading cards for the team members they would probably read something like:

Austin - Platform Engineer: Linux kingpin and Starbuck’s aficionado, Austin comes to JumpBox from the Google Mars project at ASU where he admin’d the massive IT infrastructure used to communicate with the Mars rover. Austin is an Arizona native and brings a wealth of systems experience to the team. He’s currently the person that cranks out the new builds of the appliances you see posted regularly to the site. Austin represents the Xbox gaming platform in the company.

Kimbro - CEO: The brains and vision behind the JumpBox technology, Kimbro is an audiophile, a technologist and an avid BMX trick rider from sunny AZ. Kimbro oversees technical as well as business strategy and also assists in development tasks as necessary. Kimbro has the best commute of anyone in the company consisting of a single flight of stairs. He represents the PS3 gaming platform for JumpBox.

Ben - Platform Engineer: A Ruby on Rails prodigy hailing from Kauai, Hawaii, Ben creates most of the administration tools you see visible in JumpBox appliances. Ben is a skilled rock climber and took his first tumble this weekend falling 20′ from a face in Queen Creek, AZ. We’re happy to report that Ben is A-OK and confirms that the rope does indeed arrest rapid vertical descent. Ben reps the Nintendo wii game system for JumpBox.

Sean - COO: Sean waters the plants in the office and makes sure checks clear. Sean is the third Phoenix native in the company and finds it amusing when he has to write about himself in third-person. Sean is a little behind the times and currently represents the antiquated PS2 game system for JumpBox.

So that’s the company behind the technology. The “team” is actually considerably larger as you’ll see if you browseour forums and we’re extra-stoked to have a beekeeper on board. Below is a picture of the “Buzz Board” in our office. When people download a JumpBox, we present a survey and at the very end there’s an option to upload a photo so we can see the people who are using our stuff and theoretically talking about it. This gives us a more personal connection with our users and lets us put faces to our users. If you’ve already downloaded one and want your picture up on the board here’s a direct link to that photo upload page. Our team looks forward to working with you to build more useful stuff.