5 Best Technology April Fools Jokes

April Fools is slowly becoming one of my favorite holidays.  For the past few years, tech companies have been gradually bending over backwards to make greater and greater April Fool's day pranks.  Here are my 5 favorite from today:

5. Google Treasure Maps

So you have a shovel and a pirate ship, but you left your treasure map in other pirate pants.  Google's got you covered.

4. Atlassian JIRA Jr.

Now all the little agile developer tykes and playground project managers out there can rest easy during nap time.  Atlassian has you covered with JIRA Jr.  You can even (seriously?) order a t-shirt from the site!

3. Guardian Goggles

"Wouldn't life be so much easier if you had instant access to expert reviews, cutting-edge facts and a constant stream of specially curated specially liberal and left-wing opinion?  Welcome to Guardian Goggles."

2. Gmail Blue

"We were faced with a challenge. How can we completely re-design and re-create something while keeping it exactly the same?  The answer is:"


1. Sony Animala

"What does the cat on the go want? Clarity of sound obviously. But mostly, cats want to be left the f$#!
alone."

 

Last.fm Revealations

So I think it's pretty ridiculous how much I listen to the same two bands:

1. Real Estate

2. Wild Nothing

Oh wait, never mind.  It's not ridiculous at all.  These bands are awesome.

Goodbye, GoDaddy Hosting

So for the past year, I have started to experiment with Heroku Cedar Stacks and Amazon Web Service EC2 Micro-instances.  These pseudo- (and more importantly on-demand) servers not only save you oodles of configuration time and sys-admin tasks (since they always run the latest versions of Rails, Node.js, whatever), but they are also easy to scale in a progressively cost-effective way.

Unfortunately, some of my legacy projects (that is, the old stuff that I've just had sitting on the web, un-touched for years) still lived elsewhere and moving them over to something simpler has been on my to-do list, yet never getting crossed off for almost as long.  However, this weekend, everything changed and I finally crossed that nagging task off my list.

As of today, I finally moved my last remaining files (a few random images and JS prototypes/files with URLs that needed to basically stay the same, mostly) off of my GoDaddy shared, Linux server and canceled my last remaining hosting plan there.  So I hereby, proudly announce that, after about 7+ years of succumbing to ridiculous, incremental price-gouging and gradually diminishing service quality and--perhaps most importantly--ridiculous ad campaigns...

I have finally canceled my GoDaddy hosting!*

Sure, there are tons of AWS detractors.  And what they are saying makes total sense for giant companies with their own datacenters and sunk costs.  In fact, I work for one of such companies by day and I wouldn't recommend PaaS to them.  But for independent, web development that's more focused on writing the code and then scaling later, there is no question that PaaS is superior. In my personal life, I fall into the latter category of use cases--that is, until one of my projects becomes the next Facebook or something and I have to build my own datacenters, but I'm not holding my breath there.

Anyway, since I am not yet a Facebook/Google/etc. myself, I am, from now on, going 100% PaaS/virtual, cloud hosting. Not only is it way cheaper, but just infinitely more scalable.  As of now, all of the projects you see on this site (outside of the blog itself, which is basically just a custom skinned Blogger with a custom domain) will live on Amazon Web Services and Heroku cloud services.  I am also working on a few projects for Google Apps Engine, but let's discuss those later. Until then, viva AWS/Heroku/GoogleAppsEngine.

(*Unfortunately, there is one thing I pay GoDaddy for still.  Since I've paid for a year upfront of DNS--i.e. sunk costs--I am not totally rid of GoDaddy.  I am still using GoDaddy for my DNS until they expire like in September or something. Maybe then I will write a sequel to this post and search for a simpler DNS from like that one Reddit list.  )