My applications which are built using Laravel are deployed through Laravel Forge. There is definitely extra charge for it, but having Forge to simplify deployment really save my time especially in case of any issue.

For monitoring, I am using Stackdriver which has easy-to-use health check.

Not API, but Spark Java (http://sparkjava.com/documentation#getting-started) has one of the best Java framework documentation I've ever seen. Fairly concise + it has almost everything you need to build proper Web application using Java

I am glad that you have build an excellent business which can grow, unlike some businesses cough in a reality tv show cough. Keep up good job!

This is indeed a great initiative. As many people pointed out, we need to teach young kids for them to make sense of computer science and technology in general. What hinders them from learning this seemingly hard field is the fact that computer science is very abstract. So we have to let them know the connection between loop and data processing, variable and data storage etc. I really hope that this endeavor would do the exact thing. Good luck!

Yup---after having helped to teach lots of students how to program, I've seen so many ways where people get stopped before they get started. Making it easy to get started, and very accessible are the key. I've written more about that earlier here: http://blog.codehs.com/post/31912193554/getting-stopped-befo...

"please teach him something about database normalization"

I don't always find weekend project to be as fancy but this one is exception. Good job, I really like its simplicity!

(No one does this yet, so I wanna be the first one) Happy birthday debian!

Thanks, you just get me the exact term I'm looking for. It's hard to explain to "smart" people without using any computer-ish/science-ish/math-ish terminology

I think they are delegating the task to app.net

Except app.net is neither distributed nor open source.

Yeah, this needs to be made entirely clear. App.net is a change in degree, trying to make another twitter, but better. Diaspora and identi.ca are changes in kind, trying to make something different to replace fb/twitter.

Regardless of how different Diaspora is from Facebook, they still tried to do the "social network" better. I'm pretty sure every startup wants to make stuff less suck.

By the way I remember last time when Diaspora first surfaced as the real alternative of Facebook and I was kinda excited with it. For the first time I can customized everything I want from my social network. But then the project run out of any traction and suddenly just disappeared. So I guess, while we can dream big and aim big, the big stuff would come up eventually and not just boom in the first place (as Google comes out from home garage and Facebook comes out from college dorm). It's a big disturbing how App.net just really booming in its first release but I wish them the best and hope they will succeed.

I think the size and complexity of the program is the reason why we need to think first before we look at the code. I'll probably look at the obvious indicators (logs, stacktrace etc) and then the "thinking" could begin. Obviously with a huge program there are more probability for the local fix to happen because there are so many moving parts