(mt) Heads into the Forrst

Kyle Bragger is a developer and designer and proud maker of Forrst. Forrst is gaining momentum as a destination for designers and developers to help each other share information and cool work. Forrst is hosted on (mt) Media Temple’s new (ve) Server, the flag ship product of the new (mt) ProDev line. Kyle made time for a virtual chat with (mt)’s Jason McVearry.

Kyle, Forrst is very cool.  My understanding of Forrst is it’s a place for learning. It’s like a resource site that’s actually fun to use. Am I far off?

Thanks Jason. Yeah — that’s a great way to put it. It’s a place to hang out with fellow developers and designers, share interesting content, get valuable feedback, constructive criticism on works in progress, and learn (hopefully having fun while doing so).

Can you give us a quick rundown of your background?

I live and work in NYC. I’ve been writing code since age 12, and professionally for the last 6 years or so. I’ve worked at Huffington Post, mSnap, Smart Reply, Cork’d, started a few companies (BricaBox was one that got a fair amount of buzz back in the day). I also did the whole client work thing for a while.

There’s a lot going on but seems to be a sensible mix of features…Can you go into how you picked the feature set?

Thanks. I’m a big fan of the whole MVP (minimum viable product) thing, so the very first version I built back in January was exactly that — you could post screen shots, links and code (questions came later), comment, like, and follow friends. That was it. I try to ensure that nothing unnecessary makes it into the product. Most everything I’ve added to date has either been something on my road map of what I want in the product, or has been in direct response to what my users need and are vocal about wanting.

Forrst is generating some serious excitement, sometimes inappropriate levels of excitement.

You’re still in Beta, how many users do you have, and how many do you plan to have in full production mode?

Well, actually, it’s not beta (Common misconception because it’s a closed product). The reason for that is that while I’m eager to see the community grow, I understand that it’s not a process that can be rushed. By capping the number of new users each day, the existing community has a chance to form nicely. Currently, we’ve got roughly 3,600 users, with triple that on the wait list.

You’re more of a all around technologist in terms of front and back end roles…Where did you focus most of your energy when building Forrst and who helped you out?

Ha, thank you. The prototype was designed and developed all on my own. I’m not a great designer, and it definitely needed some love in that department. When Forrst relaunched on May 1, 2010, I enlisted the help of Adam Kopec (@akopec on twitter) and Pasquale D’Silva (@pasql) Adam did user interface design (I was responsible for wire framing and product vision) and Pasquale illustrated the ranger character on the homepage; he and Adam worked together to design the homepage (I’m pretty pumped about it). In terms of my energies, I am most focused on back-end architecture, letting the pros take care of design.

Going back to usage, Forrst is built on the entirely (ve) platform. Can you briefly touch on the architecture and shed some light on your future plans for scaling (be it some hybrid cloud solution or what have you)..

Certainly. Currently Forrst is running on three (ve) boxes – one database server, one staging, and one web front-end. Each is a standard CentOS 5 install with 2gb RAM. Running MySQL 5 on the db box, and a basic PHP 5/Apache/nginx/APC/redis stack for the web servers. As far as scaling, I recently made some changes to the caching layer on the site that yielded a 10x increase in generating more complex pages, and I think things are pretty set for the immediate future. I’ll cross other bridges when I come to them.

For the curious, I wrote up a more detailed post about this back in May: Detailed Post

What specific business problems does Forrst solve and why is it better than some alternatives?

Forrst is providing a place for devs and designers to congregate, share stuff, get feedback, and learn. It solves a problem that I and too many other people had, which was lacking a central place as a dev or designer to come do that stuff. On the business side, I think there is a big opportunity here to change the way companies find and hire candidates.

If you had a technological super power, what would it be?

Being able to deal with email telepathically. Email sucks.

Jason McVearry and Forrst’s Kyle Bragger
You can follow Kyle at @kylebragger, Forrst at @forrst and Jason at @jmcvearry.