The other day, Dan (an Axosoft co-worker) and I were talking about a service we use to send large files to customers or to obtain large files from customers. The service is called yousendit.com and it works something like this: you go to a web site and upload the target file and provide the recipient’s email. The recipient receives an email message with a link to a web page where the user can download the file. Easy to use and extremely useful.
It’s a great service, but the problem is that it’s not always reliable and it has some limitations. So just as a crazy thought, Dan and I were talking about what it would take to build such a service…
We did some brainstorming over lunch and determined that the application itself should be relatively easy to write. At the core, it’s just a file upload utility, right? How hard can that be? We also determined that for the service to work well, we’ll need a lot of disk storage and tons of bandwidth. So we did a little math and determined that the most expensive part of such a service would be the bandwidth requirements (more on bandwidth later), but the hardware should be relatively inexpensive. So we thought, “wouldn’t it be fun to write such an app?“
Of course, Dan and I are both full time employees at Axosoft, so doing something like this would have to be extra-curricular activity, but we’ve decided to do it. More precisely, we have decided to do it in 1 weekend. At least, that’s the goal.
So the plan is this…
- We order the hardware we need (we're going all Dell)
- Design the project over several lunch sessions while we wait for the hardware to arrive
- Write the app, setup the hardware, install and turn it live in 1 weekend
- We document the whole thing in our blogs, including some videos of the whole process
A crazy idea, I know. I’m all about crazy ideas. We’ll see how it turns out.