Rework Labs Report May 2015
May was a little bit relax for me, mainly because the new Laravel 5.1 not release yet. I have some project waiting for it so just try to complete any pending work on hand before the new project start.
This month is busy. Two of the projects that have talk for few month, suddenly confirm and proceed. Two of the existing client enquiry for new projects. Another recurring project that happen every year is back to my hand too.
One of the new thing I try this month is doing a three-month planning for my primary client. Instead waits for requests, I take the lead and plan for what we are going to do for next three month. It will be involved server migration, framework upgrade and iOS mockup. Hopefully, I can utilize my iOS license this round.
Three major things I have done this month:
- Consolidate all hosting server
Linode finally launched their SG dc. I have migrated all my existing hosting and my client’s over to Linode, there are lots of comparison between Digital Ocean and Linode, I believe for the same bucks Linode is providing more value. Other then migration, I using this opportunity to use some of the advanced tools too, like Cloudflare, HHVM and Redis caching. - Rebuild one of client project to Laravel 5
I have one of the ongoing membership project that is a smaller size, so I just upgrade it into Laravel 5. It allows me to go through the whole upgrade process, prepare me for the next project upgrade that is a bigger site. - Setup a mail server
I need to setup a mail server for my wife’s company. I did a wrong choice in the first place, trying to get a managed cPanel VPS for it ( highly recommend WiredTree for this ). After the VPS setup and test with it, it feels more like for hosting rather than email with higher cost. So I scraped the ideas to use a control panel based VPS and found the MailInABox solution. It is a lot cheaper ( just spend on a bare VPS) and more reliable and it focus on email only.
I try out these on May.
- Highly recommended managed VPS – WiredTree
- Vultr has some VPS plan with Sata Disk
- Need a server focus on email? Mail-in-a-Box
- Laravel 5 is awesome and Laravel 5.1 which going to release soon have 3 year LTS.
- Ultimate member is nice plugin for Membership site.
- Using Laravel Forge to setup a server with HHVM + Redis for a high traffic WordPress site.
- Owncloud looks good to use within a company if you don’t want to go for Dropbox for Biz solution.
Of course with all these work, my products all are stuck in the pipeline. Currently, there are three products that I m planning, a SAAS product, a productize service and a plugin, sometimes I worry too much. For example, the productize service should be quite easy to launch but the problem I keep fear is what if I don’t have time to handle all the incoming request? But maybe I should just ship it without worry all these, or else nothing will be ship end of the day.
It’s funny that just one month ago I m still planning since no upcoming project I going to focus on my product, but the next month I have all the project queues up for next 3 month. It happens every year like this, and I trying hard to break this cycle by launching my products.
