Data Jelly

Normally, the very first post on a blog would be the best spot for an "About Us" page. However, we seem to do things a little bit differently, and felt it was now finally a good time to introduce ourselves. Not really so much about our company, but more about our blog and our employees.

The Data Jelly Blog began as a single employee's own personal blog under a different name. The original idea was to publish various tips and tricks that were learned throughout the course of building and launching our software. The topics were generally technical in nature, ranging from hosting topics such as Tomcat, Apache, and MySQL, to programming topics such as Java, JSP, and automated testing. Any time he would get stuck on an issue, he would be sure to publish a post describing the solution to help others who might run into the same problem.

We felt this was a great idea, and wanted to turn it into a company-sponsored blog. We worked to shift the blog onto the company domain name, and just recently moved it off of Blogger and onto our own web site. Now, any employees are free to add their own writeup to our blog. Choosing to publish a corporate blog is always a risky decision, as it could expose some internal secrets or even mistakes we've made. However, we felt it was important to do this for a couple reasons. First, we've learned plenty from the online community, and felt it was only fair that we try to share some of our knowledge in return. Additionally, we felt it was a good way to share information about the tools, technologies, and methodologies that we use with our clients. Lastly, it is a great way to get feedback about our approach and learn about best practices, to help us in our quest to constantly improve our service.

Since this shift, we have expanded the role of the blog a bit. Rather than writing purely about technical problems and their solutions, we have begun posting some tutorials even for issues that are relatively straightforward. To be honest, the intent of some of these articles was so that we could remember how we setup our environment, as we often need to grow and reprovision systems. However, as we've seen with our earlier posts, we would expect that these tutorials will also prove useful for others.

Over time, we've found a couple issues in particular have gained a bit of popularity, which shows that we're not alone in dealing with these technical hurdles that seem to come up rather often. We appreciate all the comments that our readers have left, and have found many of them to be especially helpful. We do feel it is worth pointing out that, while we try our best, we may not be able to help out with all questions that are left on our blog. Regardless, we encourage all of our readers to keep leaving comments, and hope that we can build a community around our blog.

Moving forward, we are hoping to expand the blog even further into new topics. Now that we have successfully opened the blog to all employees, we'd like to begin blogging about a wide variety of topics, all centered around the theme of starting a web company. Of course, everything will still be technical in nature, but we also hope to show a bit of our company culture, things we learn about business, and most importantly hope to invite feedback about how we can improve our software and our company.

We hope you find our blog helpful, and now that you know a little bit about us we'd love to hear from you... feel free to reach us as This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or leave a note in the comments!