Scout, our server monitoring service, has grown quite a bit in 2009.

We’ve documented 2 big lessons we’ve learned on the Scout Blog.

If you find it helpful, give us a vote on Hacker News.

The post We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned. appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

It hurts – it feels like giving up. You’re stuck on a problem and do the last thing that makes sense – stop thinking about it. And the minute you forgot about the problem the solution comes into focus. Sometimes it’s a shower, for others it’s a long walk or playing a video game.

The Eureka Hunt – Why do good ideas come to us when they do?, an article by Jonah Lehrer published in the the July 28th issue of the New Yorker, covered scientific research on moments of insight. There were a couple nuggets on provoking insights:

Simmer down the focus.

Avoid things that help you focus (like caffeine).

If you’re in an environment that forces you to produce and produce, and you feel very stressed, then you’re not going to have any insights…Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity.

John Kounious, Cognitive Neuroscientist, Drexel University

Set the alarm clock a few minutes early

The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconvential ideas. The right hemisphere is unusally active.

Get in a good mood

Jung-Beeman’s latest paper investigates why people who are in a good mood are so much better at solving insight puzzels (On average, they solve nearly twenty per cent more C.R.A. problems.)

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Andre, Charles, and myself leave for RailsConf Thursday.

If you want to discuss Rails monitoring, Javascript, the business of Rails, biking, camping, or dogs, talk to us!

I’m the tall, skinny scarecrow-like figure with the big head. Charles looks like he might belong to a hipster boy band. Andre…well he looks completely normal. Just look for the scarecrow and the hipster – Andre will be the other one in our group.

The post Say hello at RailsConf appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

You need to be in the Bay Area. You shouldn’t be in the Bay Area.

You need to work crazy hours. You shouldn’t work more than 4 days a week.

You need to raise as much money as you can. You shouldn’t raise money.

The topics above never seem to get old and I think it’s unfortunate.

Just run your business the way that feels right. The majority of your time during the week is spent working. Whether you’re working for yourself or for someone else, if you’re not working the way you want to, it won’t last.

The post Doing it your way appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

Scout, our server monitoring and application, is now available for public consumption.

Scout is for the 95% of us that either gave up on installing & maintaining monitoring applications or used the old fashion monitoring method – an email from a customer when your web application is down. I’m not calling you out, it’s simply that monitoring used to be more painful than not monitoring. We think Scout changes that in a beautiful way.

Scout makes it easy to bring all of your data together – from the monitoring standbys (url monitoring, server load, memory usage, etc) to modern day analytics (the number of user accounts on your web application, unique visitors, inbound links, etc). It’s all done through an easy plugin system that you configure through our web interface – you never have to login to each of your servers and install or edit monitoring scripts. You’re not limited to the plugins we built – you can roll your own with a couple of elegant lines of Ruby code.

The post Scout’s Grand Opening appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

We’ve used Scout for several months internally. Along with Colloquy, Google Docs, Basecamp, and Skitch, it’s one of the few apps I use every day.

We think this makes Scout a better service – we’re not watching Scout from a third-person perspective. However, sometimes things sneak through – the type of things that don’t bother you after using an application for months but can be hurdle to others when getting started.

There were 2 nagging issues that stood out in the Scout user experience. I’ll cover how I addressed the first one here.

With Scout, you have a client that is installed on a server. The client has many plugins, which do things like monitor a URL or the load on the server.

The pages are so similar, it’s difficult to tell you changed views.

It’s easy to blindly follow a site design blueprint and try to make every page fit the same style guidelines. I did a little too much of that in our initial release, but I think this makes the distinction between the two views much clearer without sacrificing a clean look-and-feel.

The post What’s different in this picture? appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

We recently sat down with Geoffrey Grosenbach for the Ruby on Rails Podcast and talked about Scout, PlaceShout, working as a remote team, and balancing client work with internal projects.

Listen to the Podcast

The post Highgroove featured on the Ruby on Rails Podcast appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

We thought you’d like Scout – but we didn’t expect to reach our 100 account limit in about an hour and a half.

We’re already collecting feedback and gearing up for the next launch.

Don’t worry if you didn’t get in this time – we’re collecting lots of feedback for our full launch.

If you’re need some more help getting Scout configured, have some feedback, want help writing a plugin, or just want to chat about Scout, drop by our public chat room or forums.

Thanks, and stay tuned for the launch!

The post Wow! appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

Andre and I will be at SF Beta tonight demoing PlaceShout, our short-form local reviews service.

We’re among 10 companies showing off their latest innovations (view the full list).

More information on tonight’s event is here.

Hope to see you there!

The post See PlaceShout, Other New Apps at SF Beta Tonight appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

We’re using Scout, our monitoring and reporting application, to graph the performance of our Rails applications and servers.

I’ve uploaded a video that looks at how one of our applications, PlaceShout, impacts the server load and Mongrel memory usage. I also compare PlaceShout’s footprint to another server.

Watch the video:

Signup for our launch email list

We’ve started emailing invites to Scout. Signup on our homepage, and we’ll give you access to Scout before the public launch.

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