I’m just zis guy, you know?
Hello, I’m your host Raphael Mudge and welcome to Dashnine Media. Through this blog I will introduce you to Dashnine’s projects, what I do, and my experience getting a startup off the ground in Syracuse, NY.
Where did Dashnine Media come from?
I left the Air Force 10 months ago to venture out on my own. I’m a proud alumnus of the Air Force Research Lab. I worked as a cyber security researcher during my last military tour. Great minds and important problems–what more could I ask for? I still work with my old community through Strategic Cyber, my R&D consulting firm.
Dashnine started as a domain to host my projects. The name comes from the UNIX kill command. -9 is the signal to kill a process at once.
Dashnine Media and Open Source
I’m a big fan of open source. In fact, I’ve given my fair share to the community. I don’t do this for recognition or to get slave labor to develop my ideas. Rather, I write open source because I love to code.
I code most of the projects at Dashnine Media in Sleep, a scripting language I’ve worked on for six years. I am also working on Moconti, an application server for Sleep. Moconti hosts many of the technologies on this site.
Another projected hosted at Dashnine is jIRCii. jIRCii is an Internet Relay Chat client written in Java. It is also scriptable with Sleep. I still release updates for jIRCii twice a year.
Commerical Future of Dashnine Media
I can’t say Dashnine Media has one mission. I have different projects and if I had the energy they would each have their own blog, phone number, mailing address, etc. Unfortunately I can’t do this–too much work. All my non-security work goes under the Dashnine name.
Dashnine started as a commercial entity when I published the Sleep 2.1 manual. I gave myself a week to convert my HTML documentation into a book. I wrote a lot of software that week. One day I would like to help smaller open source projects publish their documentation with this software.
Currently Dashnine has two projects, Feedback Army and After the Deadline. Feedback Army is a website usability testing service. Feedback Army is now live.
After the Deadline is a Plain English proof reader for Content Management Systems. Plain English is a concise and clear style of writing. I’m a big fan of Plain English as it removes barriers to understanding and comprehension. After the Deadline is about to enter beta testing. I’m excited to show this project to the world soon. Since you read for this long, here is a preview:
Influences
I promise, I’m not under any influences, really. Not even caffeine. Oh, wait… people. Yes.
I’m a big fan of Paul Graham. He hates Java but he started a business and wrote a programming language. I like Java and I started Dashnine Media and invented Sleep. We have some things in common. When people say I’m crazy for using my own webserver and language, I point them to Paul Graham.
I am also a big fan of Peldi Guilizzoni. He runs a Micro-ISV making software to help people mockup websites. I don’t use his product but I love how he approaches his business. He shows enthusiasm and integrity through every step. Peldi also shares his entire business, numbers included, on his blog. This takes guts and I appreciate him making the details real for people like me.
Honorable mentions include Joel Spolsky and Eric Sink. Joel influenced how I run software teams. Eric gave me a clue about the business of software.
In a nutshell this is Dashnine Media. Welcome aboard.