Jimi A new technology startup for mexican healthcare software solutions

Nginx VS Apache

Hi All,

My site's been very intermittent for the past couple of weeks, but there's a reason for that.

Currently, on the server that this website runs on, will not only host this blog, but will also serve as a reverse proxy for other applications I have running, which are mainly the Atlassian suite for all of our app development needs.

Now, I was running apache 2.2 for serving all of this stuff, but the sites always felt slow, and I was wondering if it was just the nature of the Atlassian tools which are known to be a bit fat on the runtime side. But after reading some articles on nginx, which says that really accelerates the page serving, and that is an excellent reverse proxy service, and on top of it, I saw that the Jelastic cloud service uses nginx for load balancing, I decided to benchmark my apache setup using nginx instead.

Lost in Translation…

This is just a quick post, I know it's been a while since I posted anything, but we've been hard at work on our software, planning our software code to be both as native as possible but as cross-platform as possible to avoid both code duplication and having a common secure, well tested codebase.

This post is about languages, not computer languages, but human ones.

Being this a mexican project, we've been asked a lot to have this blog translated to spanish instead, because most of our clients, and the local developers are spanish speakers, and not everyone can read or speak english well, that it would be best to have it translated.

The problem with translating this blog is that it's gonna be harder to reach out a broader technology community, and using spanish only, this would really limit our reach of both contributing and getting help from the broader, world software development community.

But, for the moment, we're gonna have to find a way of having this blog both in english for everyone, and spanish for our local community colleagues, so, we haven't really posted much until we figure this problem out and find a way of doing just that.

Thanks everyone!

MS DevCamp Experience and BizSpark

After coming back from the DevCamp, it left me with a very different perspective of what can be done with the new Windows Solutions that Microsoft is currently offering.

They have things like the new tiles UI, complete integration and sync among all your devices, the Azure solutions which covers from high availability website deployment that supports .NET and PHP, Ruby and other common website development languages, up to VM creation, web services, database management and even a full Service Bus for messaging and routing, Toast notifications, which is a push services platform that not only supports their proprietary OS (like Apple with iOS or Google with Android) but it also supports the most common mobile devices even if they are direct competition, which gives the developers the power they need to cover as much user base as they can, and not only one system.

Microsoft DevCamp Queretaro

Hi all, after an amazing time from my 32nd birthday (my bday is November 8 if someone wants to know), now I'm back to work. Checking my personal email, I got an invitation to a Microsoft DevCamp that's gonna be held here in Queretaro City.

I've never heard about MS DevCamps before, they must be new here in Mexico or at least there weren't really publicized, according to the invitation brief, it says: "Free training, in a very fun way, based on bootcamps where developers can learn from the experts and build amazing apps", also, it says that the topics here will be Windows 8, Windows Azure and Windows Phone programming, so, I decided to enroll and see how these bootcamps work.

Business Plan Crazyness

Hey all! I'm back from the day of the dead holidays!

Ok, I've just started reviewing what we have so far on our business plan, I think is going Ok, but now's that time to start building all those projections, competitive intelligence, marketing, sales, etc etc plans.

As I'm an information systems engineer, and not an economics or finance professional (I did some finance and economics at school, but not really that advanced), creating all of that stuff for the business plan is gonna be pretty tough/fun.

While doing some research, I went to have some dinner with a new, but very good friend of mine named Diane, she's been around the block many times over when creating and managing businesses, she can create amazing business plans with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back, so I decided to ask her for some advice.

Windows Support… Check!

Hey everyone, I'm really happy to announce that today we got an email from Microsoft BizSpark that our Startup program submission was successful! so now we are proudly one part Microsoft software shop.

I'm about to start the activation of the MSDN accounts, start downloading the software we'll be needing, getting the keys, subscribing to the recently opened MS Apps Store, we're really excited!

SCM Setup is a Go

Well, following up on the startup, now that we have started with all of the planning, I have a lot of standards documents, my excel spreadsheets with the basic numbers on them to start working on the business plan, the quotes, and a lot more stuff we need to start working on, now it's that time to start thinking about versioning and controlling changes on everything we do.

So, being a startup, we don't have much choices for setting up configuration and change management software, that's easy to manage, integrate, and work with, but the good thing is that, the few choices we have, are really amazing choices.

A New Startup is Born

After a few months of talking with two co-workers/friends, we started discussing the software prototype I've been building for managing a central repository of EHRs, and all of the official mexican standards involved for building such a project.

Now the thing is, I guess it's the passion I have for the subject, I got them just as excited I am about how something like this could really revolutionize the mexican healthcare industry, how improving medical attention to everyone, and trying to reach everywhere, could really make a difference to all mexicans, and not just the ones with enough money to pay for all medical treatment.

Learning and Writing About POCO

This is only a quick post, as I'm really swamped with the migration of our apps to ICE, but right now, the biggest change I'm doing so far is using POCO C++ instead of Qt for the server side.

I was decided to use Qt because of it's portability, being able to use the same code on different OS, ease of use, etc. But I had one nasty drawback: interoperability with other frameworks.

Qt has it's own version of pretty much every class, including the C++ STL, that's usually not an issue if your application works with Qt only, but when you are using another library like ICE, major problems show because ICE uses all of the standard C++ classes for parameters, so every time I needed to pass a string, list, map, etc. ICE sends and receives the parameters as std:: classes, but Qt only knows now to use it's own versions like QString, QList, QMap, etc.