My current project: Coconut

Coconut is an enterprise social networking application. Coconut is about cooperating and sharing knowledge with your colleagues. We created Coconut to fill a void in our own organisation. Since most of our employees work for (and at) our customers, it proved quite difficult to share a common culture between us. Besides a company culture, we were faced with a simple problem: how to find the person with the right knowledge to solve the problems our customers are facing.

To solve these problems, we realized we needed a solution which was centered around our employees. They should enjoy using the product, because more engagement means that it becomes easier to find the right people. This is why we created Coconut.

I could list the features in Coconut, but I think it's better you discover it by going through my blog posts. Most features will eventually get a screencast, which I will publish in time. At the moment, the Coconut promo site is only in Dutch.

Of course, you'll want to know more about the technique behind Coconut. First of all: it's build in Ruby on Rails, the best web framework available at the moment. We use a simple MySQL database to store data. Our search index is provided by Apache Solr. In an effort to speed up the application, we've started using Memcached and Redis for faster storage. For javascript, we use some of the coolest frameworks and plugins, like jQuery, Prototype, TinyMCE and Plupload. We also use some really great gems, like Capistrano, Bundler, RSpec, Machinist, Sass, WillPaginate, Sanitize, Dalli and last and certainly least Cbac. And my tools include Redmine, Git and RubyMine. And of course we need some applications to run Coconut, for that we use Fedora or Redhat in combination with Apache, Tomcat and Phusion Passenger. My greatest appreciation and thanks go out to everyone involved in creating these great tools, frameworks, gems and plugins. We couldn't get the job done without your work.