13 years

If you’ve been reading my blog for a very long time, or listening to my podcast, you probably know that in addition to my business Riverfold Software, I also have a “regular” job at VitalSource. As that company has grown, I feel less comfortable blogging about my work there, since I can’t speak for the company or even the smaller group I directly work with.

But this month is my 13th anniversary (!) with VitalSource, so I thought it would be interesting to look back on the times I’ve blogged about my work there, and highlight some of things I’ve helped build.

One of the earlier posts, back in 2005, was about our new store, where I linked to blog posts from James Duncan Davidson, Mike Clark, and Ryan Irelan about the project. But nearly a decade of migrating between blog systems has taken its toll; my post is still there, but the other links are all 404 not found.

Then from 2007, I wrote about syncing highlights and notes in e-books:

“The architecture is based on the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS and OPML. On top of that we have added a VitalSource namespace and a few extra XML elements and attributes to keep track of Bookshelf-specific data, such as highlighter color and selected text within a book. The goal is to keep it as open as possible, so that in the future we can both consume other sources of user notes, and allow third-parties to also hook into the data in interesting ways.”

We recently updated the API to use a new, faster sync architecture, but the web app is still in use today. I’ve been updating it for Rails 4, a tedious process because of the Rails community’s fascination with deprecation.

Again in 2007, I mentioned updates to two of my favorite apps, MarsEdit 1.2 and NetNewsWire 3.0, along with VitalSource Bookshelf 4.6:

“At VitalSource we also just released Bookshelf 4.6 today, which lays the foundation for media-rich textbooks and adds a highlighter rating UI for any subscribed highlighters you have. This data will bubble up in a few places in the future to allow you to discover people and books, although for now it’s one-way.”

It’s neat looking back on this post because it includes a short screencast of the app from 2007, presumably running on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The promise of this highlighter ratings feature never really materialized, though.

In 2010, I thought about the iPad right before its release:

“I’m working on 2 apps for the iPad. The first is just a minor iPad refresh of an existing iPhone app at VitalSource called Bookshelf Noteview (iTunes link). It’s for reading notes and highlights synced from our e-book platform.”

Noteview was eventually removed from sale. The other app I hinted at would become Tweet Library.

Around the same time, I blogged about Mac OS X as a server platform:

“At VitalSource we now have a dozen Xserves running Ruby on Rails and a couple others running MySQL. While it’s mostly stable now, over the years there have been several mystery show-stopper problems that no one seems to have on other platforms.”

Obviously Apple no longer sells the Xserve. At VitalSource all our best new servers run Linux.

Also in 2010, I reflected on how a team grows:

“If you’re working by yourself and add another person to the project, a funny thing happens: you become a manager. Before, you could spend 100% of your time on the work. Now you can allocate 50-75%, because you’re getting the new programmer up to speed, answering questions, and setting priorities. If you’re lucky (and I usually am), the person you added is contributing so much that it easily makes up for your loss in productivity, and then some.”

Later in 2010, I described how we shipped Bookshelf for iPhone:

“At its core the app is 3 parts: a large C++ codebase, brand new Objective-C UI code, and a bunch of clever WebKit and JavaScript work. In many ways it’s a more difficult project than my other iPad app (still in development), but some great coders contributed to different parts of the architecture, before and after I joined the project.”

There are other posts, but I think these hit some of the more interesting milestones in the last 13 years. I also have an archive of earlier, company-internal blog posts, starting in 2001, that I hope to look into and publish pieces from one day.

Manton Reece @manton