How do we power local rentals?

Posted on | January 12, 2009 | No Comments

We say Crowd Rent powers local rentals.  And that may be true but what powers Crowd Rent?  Free software!  There is not a single piece of software that cost us money.  We use the NetBeans 6.5 IDE to develop the code, we use MySQL as the database for all of this, Ruby on Rails to power the application, and Linux as our operating system of choice.  Now this was quite a departure from my previous life as a Windows developer.  After I graduated from Arizona State University with my Bachelor’s of Science in Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering I went to work for U-Haul.  Not the ideal job for my degree but I quickly found I enjoyed.  I worked on the reservations website and we worked with C#, ASP.NET, and Windows.  We were doing over a million dollars a day in reservations.  I got called by the CEO when things went bad since it was so important.  I think C# and the ASP.NET framework are great.  My opinions of Windows aren’t as favorable in the server environment.

After going back to school at Colorado State University to get my Masters of Computer Science I was reunited with Linux.  I used it heavily in my Parallel Programming class where we did OpenMP and MPI development on government supercomputers.  With Crowd Rent up and running I do enjoy working with Linux as a server.  Tailing log files, updating via FTP, and managing MySQL via command line aren’t so bad.  I can SSH into my production servers from my BlackBerry and fix issues on the tiny screen.  Or tail the log files on my 24″ monitor all day long.  I do have to admit, I think I want a Mac Book to develop on now.

So to sum it up, via the transative property, you can see the Open Source software powers local rentals.  It’s fun to be a geek sometimes.

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