The entire Q&A with Jeff – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
Jeff Ammons is the President of the Gwinnett, Georgia, Microsoft User Group (GGMUG). As the hosting sponsor of the GGMUG since 2010, we wanted to learn more about Jeff and his group and we talked with him recently to get the details about what he has going on and how it all came to be.
Thanks for talking with us Jeff. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background.
I’ve worked for a variety of companies over the past couple of decades ranging from very small to very large. My longest experience was with the Atlanta Journal Constitution where I spent ten years. I love the AJC, but newspapers are having a hard time in the 21st century.
The entire Kids-U GiveCamp story – and many more customer stories – are available on our website.
Kids-U is a Texas non-profit that has provided after school tutoring in math, language arts and reading to over 3,000 students in Dallas. 99.9% of Kids-U students have been promoted to the next school grade. How can an organization like this afford to hire designers, developers, business consultants and IT professionals? In short, they can’t. Every single penny they raise goes towards ensuring underprivileged children get the support they need.
Recently, Ryan Gilmour and Dallas GiveCamp teamed up to build a great database application for Kids-U. GiveCamp is a weekend-long event that pairs charitable organizations with technology professionals who donate their time to assist these non-profits in developing solutions, strategies and tools that help them continue their good work more effectively and efficiently.
One of the cool things about Everleap is the ability to run your site from multiple servers and have those servers automatically load balanced. A lot of complicated things take place on the router to achieve load balancing, but in simple terms load balancing is just the equal distribution of the incoming requests across whatever number of servers the site is running on.
For example, if your site is running on two servers (something that’s available for every site on Everleap), and 100 requests come in for the site, 50 requests will go to each of the two servers. That way the incoming load is balanced between the available servers.
The entire Q&A with Kyle – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
This year’s Little Rock Techfest is taking place on October 16th, 2015 at the Statehouse Convention Center in Arkansas. As the hosting sponsor for the conference, we recently caught up with developer Kyle Neumeier, one of the organizers, to learn more about the event.
Everleap: Thanks for talking with us Kyle. Could you tell us a little more about yourself and your professional background?
Kyle Neumeier: I’m a software developer based in Little Rock, Arkansas. I deal mainly with Microsoft technology but have used other tech as well, namely Java, in the past. I’ve been doing this for eight years. I currently work remotely for CareEvolution, a health information technology company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The entire Q&A with Neil – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
Avid cyclist Neil Baker started ezRider in 2012. Neil is a programmer who works professionally in the Electrical Engineering industry with experience in developing Windows desktop database applications. He paired his love of bike riding with his programming knowledge to a build a site that connects riders with others in their local area. Recently, Neil made some upgrades to his site, taking his site into the cloud with Everleap.
Everleap: Thanks for talking with us Neil. First off, let’s chat a little bit about your site and how it got started.
Neil Baker: Melbourne Australia’s Beach Road is one of the busiest roads in the world for weekend warrior road bike riding. It is estimated that there are up to 30,000 riders on the road on a good weekend. Around five years ago, I became one of them. These riders consist of single riders as well as small, medium and large groups. In my group, around four to ten of us would ride regularly on Saturdays and Sundays. Organizing our group meant “are you going yes or no?” phone calls and mass SMS about the planned ride and where to meet. This worked well, but we never knew who was going to turn up – people were at times left alone at the meeting spot or we left without someone.
The entire Q&A with Jason – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
GoldenSlam.com was founded by developer Jason Mauss. Jason started programming as a teenager in the 1990s and he is currently a Lead Software Engineer for a data center company. GoldenSlam.com gives tennis fans the opportunity to play a fantasy tennis game and follow players, scores and stats from the pro tour, while also being part of a community of individuals passionate about the sport.
Everleap: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Jason. Tell us a little bit about your site and how it got started.
Jason Mauss: I had the idea for the site kicking around my head for a long time. When you look at other popular sports like hockey, baseball, soccer, and football, they all have data easily available on tons of sites, with all kinds of ways fans can invest themselves in the sport. It used to be that you would just watch your favorite team once a week and that would be about it. Millions of fans can now watch ALL of the games played each week, create their own fantasy rosters and really just live and breathe their sport.
The entire Q&A with Jeremy – and more customer stories – are available on our site.
Country Meats started in the late 1970s as a meat cutting operation. The family owned and operated business grew over the years to include a smoked house for producing cured hams and bacon. 2013 marked their 35th year in the meat business. They have sold over 70 million snacks to date in 16 flavors for fundraising projects across the US.
Thanks for talking with us Jeremy. Tell us about the history of your site and your move toward e-commerce.
I made our first site, an information page to show flavors, in MS Front Page in 2004. I reverse engineered a PHP contact form I found for free on the internet. We were countrymeats.tripod.com or something free like that.
We’ve made some changes to the way Control Panel fetches and presents data. The changes will make some pages considerably faster than they have been in the past.
We spent some time carving up the out-of-the-box Windows Azure Pack control panel API, and we were able to make some pretty dramatic page loading time improvements. You’ll see a faster main page after login, and a faster site page. Those were the two slowest pages so they were the first ones we wanted to attack. We’re continuing work on improving speed elsewhere in Control Panel as well.
You’ve always been able to make a real-time backup of your databases in Control Panel, but if you needed yesterday’s database, or the one from the day before, you had to contact us and wait while someone over here retrieved it for you and dropped it into your site.
That’s never been convenient or efficient, so we got to thinking, “Why don’t we just expose our daily backups to the customers?” And now we have. Effective immediately, we’re giving you direct access to our SQL database backups.
XWord Info is a comprehensive online record of the daily New York Times crossword puzzles dating back to 1959. It is the most accurate source of puzzle data from the publication, updated as soon as each new puzzle is available on the web.
We talked recently with site founder and crossword junkie Jim Horne to learn a little more about his site and his set-up.
Thanks for talking with us Jim. How did you get into crossword puzzles and what’s the background of the site?
I used to write about crosswords for the New York Times and I wanted a way to collect and analyze statistical information about the crosswords themselves. That evolved into what XWord Info is today, a comprehensive record of New York Times crosswords.