Memonic

Over on the Memonic blog I blogged about why and how we work with Python at Memonic. As the original blog is now archived, I later reproduced the article below. Python Fun fact: Memonic is written entirely in Python. Why did we choose this particular programming language? After all - aren’t all the serious developers on Java and the cool ones on Ruby? When we thought about the programming language to use, we already knew how our architecture was going to look, namely that we’d have a frontend and lots of small backend web services. That’s a setup we had previously implemented successfully at local.ch. But at local.ch we had the frontend in PHP and the backend in Java. At Memonic we wanted everything to run on one language so every developer could feasibly work on the whole stack. This threw out PHP which isn’t so great for daemons and services (but I still like it for frontend work, especially with Okapi). We then had Ruby, Java and Python in the race. Without going into detail about why the other two languages suck ;-) Python won us over because of it’s maturity and the very wide selection of frameworks and libraries. ...

I spent the past weekend in Paris and tried to go paperless with the iPhone. At the same time I wanted to keep data roaming deactivated. So before the trip I researched some offline applications to make the best out of this vacation. And was very surprised by the selection of very good apps that do not need permanent Internet access. I’ll quickly introduce the apps I used. OffMaps OffMaps is an iPhone map application using the OpenStreetMap data. That data is now surprisingly complete for many European cities and even includes many POIs such as restaurants, bars, public baths and many more. ...

The past few days I created a mobile site for Memonic. During this I made use of some of the newly found knowledge from the past Webtuesday which Adrian Kosmaczewski was kind enough to share. See also my notes about iPhone web development from that event. The goal of this mobile site was to get a broad device coverage. As we’ll create an application for the iPhone, it was especially important to get a nice site for all the other devices. During his talk Adrian mentioned the Yahoo! Blueprint framework and I was sold quickly. ...