Today, after a lot of thought and hacking, we’re proud to announce the launch of p2prescue.org, the web hub of what Sean describes as a U.S.-based, not-for-profit organization working to raise awareness about and deliver support to Sri Lanka. At a time where NGOs and aid organisations are a dime a dozen in Sri Lanka, it was an experience to work with a group of people who were approaching our nation’s problems from a different angle. People have needs, and indeed, people have always had needs, and always will. What makes an aid effort stand out from the rest, however, is how they choose to approach these needs.

Focused on enabling sustainable development through training people, and creating jobs, Sean dubs the organisation’s approach P2P, or People to People. In a world where organisations are becoming increasingly bureaucratic, it is good to see one that is choosing to interact at the grassroots level. It is a good reminder to everyone that aid is not just about money.

The P2P Rescue Shop, powered by WP e-Commerce

From a technical point-of-view, the Shop portion of the site is an important one. Using the free plugin WP e-Commerce, we setup a virtual shopping cart via which visitors can choose to purchase the items that Sean’s various P2P projects have created. At the moment, the Tsunami Birdhouses seem to be hot, and rightly so - made entirely from items salvaged during the December 2004 Tsunami, these creations are a real life example of using what you have, one of P2P Rescue’s main dictums.

Socially, the Voices section is certainly the website’s most striking feature. Taking the form of a weblog, this section is where the people behind P2P Rescue have their say. From status updates from Sean himself, to stories of how the bird houses were made, this is the face of P2P Rescue, and is certainly what our readers will find most interesting. If you’ve never been to Sri Lanka, and are curious about what it’s like, the Voices section is a great place to wet your interest.

All in all, we learnt a lot from P2P Rescue. As a web organisation ourselves, its novel approach to communication in the real world made us challenge many of our own ideas and preconceptions, and helped us realise that no matter where you are, the only constructive way forward is indeed People to People. In any case, that’s enough from our end. Let’s hear what Sean Kelly has to say about the project.

Left-to-right: Sean Kelly, Her Highness Alexandra Princess of Denmark, and Michael Parayno.

Vesess: In a region where many countries were affected by the December 2004 Tsunami, why did you choose Sri Lanka in particular as a base of operations?

Sean: My thinking on this wasn’t clear in the beginning. I knew I wanted to employ and train people to create items from salvaged tsunami items to help raise money. But such wreckage was, of course, available anywhere and everywhere. I originally considered Banda Aceh because of how severely destroyed it appeared in aerial video/photos. It seemed soon enough, however, that Aceh was already getting incredible attention.

Before I was too far in with my planning I heard from a former colleague, Francesca Koe, who was just beginning to work with an international team on a reef-restoration, memorial, and scuba project in Sri Lanka. After a few discussions, I decided I would join her and others in Sri Lanka to see if I could assist with raising awareness around their work. That was mainly the deciding factor.

Even before my first trip to Sri Lanka, however, I felt the plans were ideal. I knew very little about the country and figured few others in America did, either. I thought my experience as a writer would be put to good use not just in describing existing funds, but in showing the world the wonderful sides of a country I myself was just coming into contact with.

Vesess: What are the advantages of peer-to-peer, or as you put it, People-to-People communication and interaction, when compared with more traditional aid and rescue deployments?

Sean: If you are aware of network technology structures, the client/server approach involves (for example) one server passing data between multiple clients. The server has most of the power. This, to me, seems a great deal like how major aid organizations operate with regard to donors. The organization (server) holds most of the power and ultimately decides where the money goes. The donors feed the server their money but have limited decision-making powers.

The P2P model doesn’t differentiate between clients and servers. Everything is equal and the true power of a P2P system is how each “peer” works with the next. The idea struck me as a major change of approach in the business of giving aid or adopting “social change.”

In my view, the aid organization, volunteers, donors, and even the beneficiaries of aid are all equal and impact the system. In this view, the organization is extremely receptive to outside action. It is dependent upon it too. If this “network of equals” fails to act, the system collapses entirely.

This has proven to me an innovative way to view aid–at times it was Sri Lanka that contributed most to the system by way of hard work and creativity. At other times, people in Sri Lanka flagged and suddenly people in America re-focused. The P2P model allows for waves of inspiration as they come naturally in the process.

Vesess: As a technology company, it was interesting for us to see p2p being used in the offline sphere. How and why did it work in real life?

Sean: It is still a work in progress, of course. I think there is tremendous potential to the idea as a model for empowering people. But it is an ideology that is threatened by two major influences: the situation of the world as a whole and the willingness of all involved to strive for equality.

With regard to the latter I have discovered that major aid agencies often don’t adequately seek input from the people they are helping or their donors. They often give as an authority. A power over donors or beneficiaries. Donors, too, don’t seem all that interested in equality. They donate based on a level of guilt that is satisfied purely on handing over some money and then forgetting about what happens to it, rather than following it to its end. And the receivers of aid are often just that. They receive without being motivated to put something back into the system, to create their own equality.

And of course, the overall state of world health is a hugely mitigating factor. Striving for equality and social change requires effort and concentration, and the world is enduring am incredible level of suffering at this time in history. Just think of Hurricane Katrina, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the price of food, a looming worldwide recession, various sad and unfortunate wars and human rights abuses.

For the P2P model of social change to work, it needs all communities in all areas to strive for some semblance of equality.

Vesess: In your opinion, is it possible for a social system, online, or offline, to sustain itself without a distinct hierarchy of control? In other words, is p2p communication sustainable as a political system?

I think if you follow the ideology far enough down the line it is conceivable. I believe it works, bit by bit, on a small scale. But for it to be effective on a global scale would require a major change to human nature. Do we, as humans, really want to strive or equality? The increasingly large gap between haves and have-nots, the billionaires and those living off a small bag of rice, suggests we don’t. I should add that by equality I am not suggesting socialism or communism or some other political model. I’m not suggesting fascism either. Socially and politically people need guidance. There will always be gaps separating people by strengths and weaknesses. But in the world of social change, I think striving for greater equality and being open to learning both from those people who have more AND less than you has tremendous value.

In that sense, I consider myself directly in the middle. I am learning from myself and other people who, like me, are just trying to do their best. Yet I am open to learning, and have learned, incredible lessons from the donor who would hand me his/her hard earned money and the impoverished Sri Lankan who shared his King Coconut.

Vesess: What advice would you have for anyone looking to setup a similar initiative?

Sean: You said your readers are pretty tech savvy, so let’s stick with the technology world for a moment. There are thousands of small aid organizations, each often repeating the work of the next. That’s like thousands of P2P networks. There’s one clear answer to how they can be more efficient–through APIs. Developing standard ways of connecting them all together would certainly go a long way toward creating greater efficiencies between organizations. Connecting P2P Rescue to, say, a pertinent segment of Unicef efforts, a small team in Sri Lanka, a network working on parallel efforts in the Philippines, and so on, could see enormous rewards on all fronts. Shared assets and contacts. Faster mobilization. Those are some obvious examples.

The reality, however, is in my experience attempting to work with major aid organizations in and out of Sri Lanka, I continued to bump into closed (proprietary?) systems. Yes, I HAD located and met with and assessed sites needing a total of 309 homes along the southwest coast. I offered my full support and resources to cooperate in rebuilding programs. But I was turned away for a variety of reasons–political, religious, bureaucratic.

Perhaps some of the reasons were legitimate. But tell that to the family of six living under a corrugated tin roof with no bathroom facilities. The very idea behind P2P Rescue is essentially, if you have resources to spare to a place where resources are needed, you are part of the network. You don’t need to be Christian, for example. You just need to be willing to get your hands dirty for the benefit of another.

Thank you Sean, and P2P Rescue, for everything you taught us during this project. We’re sure you guys are going to do great things in Sri Lanka, and South Asia. Good luck!

Therefore, to us, this announcement we’re making today is just another footfall in the right direction. For a while now, all Vesess production machines have been running GNU/Linux, and with the launch of Vesess v5, we are proud to say that it will be our platform of choice from now on.

We will not be upgrading to Vista.

We will use a Free operating system.

Why? Well, there are lots of reasons.

First and foremost, it’s the right thing to do. In an age where proprietary software and software patents are crippling creativity, we refuse to use a locked down OS to do what we do. At Vesess, we’re in the business of sharing information, not restricting it, and thus GNU/Linux was the obvious choice when it came to picking an OS.

Secondly, it’s good business sense. Yes, you heard that right. Morals and ethics aside, Free Software makes for good business. All the CMS software we use is Free, both as in speech, and as in beer. With a wide support community, and hundreds of plugins developed by people just like us, the Wordpress, Drupal and MODx communities have all the support we could ever want. Why pay through your nose for overpriced (and often outsourced) tech support when you can get what you need straight from the horse’s mouth. Not to mention, there are often thousands of said horses.

Thirdly, it’s safer to run GNU/Linux. Everytime we take on a new client, we make a commitment to secure and protect more data. In today’s world, an organisation’s web presence is of utmost importance to them, and that’s why security is one of our biggest concerns here at Vesess. Our servers have always been powered by GNU/Linux, and always will be. No other OS out there can match the stability, flexibility and ease of use of a good server install of GNU/Linux, and no other OS has such a low turnaround time on security patches and fixes. We run GNU/Linux on our servers because we have no room for lapses in security, and after years of experimenting, have found that it’s the only way to ensure a secure web experience for all our clients.

So, in terms of ethics, business sense and security, Free Software makes a lot of sense, and we’re proud to announce today that we’ve officially made the move into the light.

Now on to the fun stuff. Here are our individual setups, and what we do with them.

Lakshan

Our resident RoR hacker, Lakshan currently runs Ubuntu 7.10, the most recent release of the Ubuntu Linux OS that has become so popular over the past few years. On a day to day basis, he uses Firefox and Gedit for research and development, along with Pidgin, Transmission and Amarok, for recreational purposes. In the console, he uses OpenSSH and git to keep the Vesess development servers running smoothly.

Amila

A veteran slicer and dicer, Amila uses Dreamweaver and Fireworks running under wine to handle all the design and coding he has to do. Having experimented with several other tools, he finds that he still works best with the Macromedia products. His favourite non-development tools include xchat and qBittorrent.

Laknath

Laknath, our PHP guru, frequently uses Gedit, Firefox 3, kTorrent, and Evince. Having got sick of Vista a while back, he now runs Ubuntu exclusively. While waiting for his favourite plugins to be released for Firefox 3, Laknath also looks forward to seeing Free, working drivers for nVidia video cards.

Mahangu

A Free Software zealot, Mahangu runs Debian Lenny, the current testing release of Debian GNU/Linux. Our resident writer, he makes use of vim and Ice Weasel on a daily basis. A console guy guy through and through, he uses fetchmail, Mutt and exim4 for email, and irssi via SSH for IRC. As far as moving pictures go however, it’s Deluge, and VLC all the way.

Well, there you have it - how the Vesess production team uses GNU/Linux for fun and profit. Got questions? Post them in this thread, and we’ll do our best to answer.

What is it? Well, we’re not ready to reveal all just yet, but here is a wee hint to base your speculations on.

Now, on to the design. At Vesess, we’ve been through five redesigns, and think that we’ve finally found one we’ll be sticking with for a while. Simple, elegant, and easy on the eyes, Vesess V5 draws your attention to the content, which is after all, what we really want you to see. Indeed, at a time when websites are getting bigger, bulkier, and definitely more complicated, we’re proud to be going in the other direction.

According to tradition, a website should be static, and only redesigned once or twice a decade. Well, this is a myth, and an annoying one at that. We believe that a website is a dynamic entity, and that it should live, and breath and grow, just like an organisation. One year ago, we launched Vesess v4, and today we’re proud to have you with us as we take another step in to the world wild web.

Listen, create, evolve. This is what we continue to do, and as we launch v5, we’re really hyped about all new things we have planned for this next phase of Vesessination. Till we post again, the Vesess crew wishes you good speeds, and safe browsing!

As you may have noticed, we set the tone for this shift in focus a while back with our Vesess.com v4 design, by changing our tagline to design + code. What are we saying? We hired some code monkeys, and well, things are paying off, chum! We’re not allowed to talk specifics yet (Lankitha does terrible things to people who leak info), but rest assured that the first line of web apps from Vesess is just around the corner.

What kind of web apps, you ask? Social networking? Well, sorta. Think of it as social networking for small businesses. A matchmaking service for startups. Is it just an extension to gowebplans? Well, it’s an extension, but not just an extension. As we said earlier though, that’s about all we can say for now. There is, however, one small favour you can do for us.

Fill out this wee survey, and help us understand what you, as a small business owner, want from a web app aimed at making your life easier. What do you get from it? Well, we’re all out of cookies, but how does 25$ sound?

25$ for filling out a survey? Yes. And no, we do not require your Credit Card number to verify your personal details.

I would form parallel lives for myself, existences in which I would be a cop, a pirate, a skydiver. Books were not just entertainment to me. They were a far bigger part of my life.

Then, as I came in to contact with the Internet, I began to look at reading in a different manner. Did I read? Of course. I mean, find me a web junkie who doesn’t read. I read, and I read a lot. A lot of crap, it turns out. One of the biggest drawbacks of having a strong online life is that you constantly have to be up to date on the latest trends, memes, and lulz (epic or otherwise) to stay in the game.

You can’t, for example, have someone send you a lolcat, and not know what it is. That is Internet geek suicide. So, we, the geeks, obsessively refresh our feed readers throughout the day, looking for that bit of new information. In the real world, knowledge is power. On the Intarweb, having seen the latest youtube video first is enough to put you ahead of the rest.

Anyway, I digress. Today, I cleaned out my room. It was the first real cleanup it had received since I finished my secondary education, and believe me, it showed. After wiping away layer upon layer of dust, I stacked everything in to marginally neat piles, and began to sort through them one by one. What did I discover?

I had a lot of books. In fact, well over fifty percent of my room was literature. From Sue Townsend to Romesh Gunasekara, my room was full of books. Now, I would love to say that I had read most of them, and a few years back this would have been the truth. Looking at my stack of books now, however, I say with shame that I’ve read less than a quarter of them.
Is this because I’m a slow reader? Far from it. When I get started, it’s hard to stop me. Why, then? Why did I have so many unread books. Did I not like reading? No, I loved reading, and going through every one of them was on my todo list. After Slashdot of course.

And there lay my problem. Looking back at my five or so odd years of spending a lot of time online, I realized that I had wasted hours, days, and perhaps even weeks and months, reading some moron’s sarcastic comments about the latest linux distro. I had wasted time listening, and arguing with my fellow netizens about issues that would have never concerned me in the real world. Who cares if vim is better than emacs (which it is, make no mistake about that)? What does it matter if that dude on IRC just doesn’t get the difference between your and you’re? To be honest, who cares? Not me. At least not now.

After much thought and internal debate, I’ve come to the conclusion that the series of tubes killed my reading habit, and I’m going to do my best to recultivate it. Starting now, I’m going to read less tech news, and devour more literature. I’m going to read less blogs, and read more of the books that have shaped humanity in general. Now don’t get me wrong, I love geeky cat macros as much as the next net junkie. I’m just going to try and have more epic lulz while reading Bill Bryson.

Starting now, I’m going to make a conscious effort to spend less time online, and read more text straight from them good old dead trees. What about you? Think you can close that feed reader and go pick up a dead tree book right now? Try it, I dare you.

The old Gowebplans site

So, our coders went back to coding, our designers went back to designing and our executive team sat back and thought about what went wrong. Finally, after a lengthy analysis of our strategy, we decided that it needed some changes.

A few months later, and here we are, ready to try again. Now, if someone were to look at all this negatively, they’d say that we failed. Of course, we like to think along the lines of Thomas Edison.

We found a way not to run a web development service for SMEs.

We made a few mistakes, we pushed a few wrong pixels, but we’re here to try again. A lot of time and effort has gone in to this site, and our hope is that our new strategy will make our services more attractive to other small businesses.

Gowebplans, revamped

It may surprise you, but in the process we have learnt a lot about our sphere of business, and have found new tools and methods to serve SMEs better. We have expanded our services list to meet new demands, and are proud to present you with a stronger, and more robust web platform than our first offering. Our conclusion? Though it can be frustrating, not inventing something is sometimes as good as inventing it, and what you learn along the way will often far outweigh the time spent rethinking a strategy.

When something goes wrong, there are two main ways to deal with it. You can either ignore the problem, and continue to live in a crumbling house, or you can grab your pencils and paper and go back to the drawing board. It may take a few thousand sketches, but you will eventually understand what is wrong. It is also very likely that you will find a fix along the way.

So, even as we give this a second shot, we hope that Gowebplans will help other small businesses out there by giving them another opportunity to put themselves online. Tried once and didn’t get what you expected? We know the feeling. This time try a web plan from another small business - a company that has faced, and is still facing many of the struggles you have.

Think big, start small, keep trying.

Good web apps are a combination of intuitive interfaces + solid code

The quality of web application’s code lies within the simplicity, flexibility and understandability of it. Thus, agile development has quickly become the way of the web dev. At Vesess, our web team is no different. We do web apps with 1 designer + 1 developer. So, having said that, it’s time for us to share a little of how we approach this task. We’ll begin by dwelling on some fairly abstract concepts.

Use a Framework

It’s always better to use an existing web application framework rather than starting everything from the scratch. Frameworks provide you with a solid base to focus on the problem you want to solve. In the long run, that’s a lot better than having to worry about infrastructural issues. These frameworks are written in different languages and follows several conventions. Our recommendation is to work with a framework that is written following the MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture, as this is the most productive kind to work with.

When choosing a framework it’s good to consider these factors:

1. Your developer’s proficiency with the language involved.
2. The suitability of the framework to the problem domain (for example, frameworks such as MODx or Silverstripe best used in the development of content rich sites).
3. Your deployment environment and budget.

Use a Source Code Management System (SCM)

We recommend that you use a SCM such as Subversion to manage your application code from the beginning. Got only one developer on the project? We still think it’s worthwhile. SCM systems are a great insurance for developers since they have the comfort of a code rollback at all times, and can even sync their projects easily between multiple PCs.

Further having a code repository makes your life easy when it comes to application deployment. You could simply use a tool such as Capistrano with your repository to deploy your application on a remote server.

Choose a Good Editor

A web application project may contain code written in different languages, with snippets stored in different file formats and in different directory structures. Thus, it is essential that you use a editor or IDE which supports all of these conventions. Of course, syntax highlighting and smart indention will help you write clear, precise code, and in the long run will make hunting bugs that much easier. Many modern IDEs also have smart pop-up menus that can complete code for you. Although veteran coders often shun such features, they can save you a lot of time and keystrokes when typing in repetitive strings.

If you are on mac you could get your hands on TextMate or Coda. Linux users on the other hand might like to try this lightweight editor called Scribes, especially if you feel Vim and Emacs are too much for you. If you are willing to use a web based IDE, Aptana is a great one.

Use AJAX and JavaScript wisely

Lot of web applications get bloated with unnecessary AJAX and JavaScript effects. Don’t let the application’s usability drop because of the overuse of these. Always make your JavaScript unobtrusive and have fall through methods for your AJAX calls. Make the habit of using the Firebug plugin for testing and tweaking your JavaScript.

Test your Code

Most of the major web application frameworks come with an integrated testing environment, and we recommended that you use them to do unit and functional tests on your application. Best practice would be to create the test cases alongside the development classes and test as you go along. Time spent on this will prevent you from falling into blind errors mid way in to development. Another good approach would be to use a test tool such as Selenium to troubleshoot browser compatibility and perform system functional testing.

Use a Bug Tracker

Although you will not need a fully fledged tracking system such as Bugzilla or Trac, maintaining a task list for bugs in your Project Management portal would be a wise thing to do. Keep all the bugs recorded there, as this might save you the trouble of fixing the same bug twice, and so on. Lighthouse seems to be a nice hosted bug tracker for web application projects.

Abstract and extend your Code

In the long run you may want to release an API for your application or you might want it to be compatible with mobile devices. Making your code abstract will give you the option of reusing and porting it. Always have a meaningful naming convention (usually, frameworks such as Rails force you to do this) for classes and models, as this will save you (and perhaps others) a lot of confusions later on. Also try to incorporate things like Microformats in to your application, since this will enable you to structure the output in a logical manner and make it easy to consume.

Yet we manage to get things horribly wrong with startling frequency. And almost always the reason could be traced back to lack of proper user input in the early stages of design. In a rare productive meeting yesterday, a Client shattered all our assumptions and injected a good dose of common sense in to our heads when he pointed out some glaring flaws in the design of a web application we were developing. In addition to saving us a lot of wasted effort and significantly improving the usability of the interface, that meeting also reminded us of the importance and usefulness of paper prototyping.

What on earth is a list?

This particular web application facilitates online recruitment, and a primary function involves an employer (the user in this instance) picking suitable candidates from a pool of applicants, and adding them to “lists”. For example, if the user wants to hire a designer, she would create a list for this purpose and add candidates to that list. In our design, the list name was independent from the actual job title: she could just create a list named “my hot list” and add people, and set the job title for that list later.

In true Getting Real fashion, we had the interfaces done first. We started explaining the above process to the client (who, fortunately, fits the role of the user perfectly), using a set of crude wireframes:

Lankitha: First, the user creates a list-

Client: Hold on, what’s a list?

L: That’s just a place for you to add candidates, like a folder in your computer-

C: Why is it called a list then? Why not folder or something?

L: Because it’s not really a folder; it’s a list of candidates

C: Er, OK…

L: So, the user creates a list-

C: Hold on, this is confusing… What on earth is a list?

It went steadily downhill from there onwards. Our first reaction was to be defensive: after all, we had put a considerable amount of effort in to designing the process and the interfaces, and before we could even get started, we were faced with a stumbling block. Surely the client was wrong?

It took a couple of minutes to realize what was happening. Paper (or, in this instance, on-screen) prototyping was already paying dividends.

Paper prototypes to the rescue

Highlighting our mistaken labeling was only the beginning. We continued with a different label and along the way found out several other problems too. At the end of the session we realized that a major overhaul of the process was called for, and a number of changes to the interfaces were in order.

Cheap yet effective

I wouldn’t call what we had a usability test: it turned out to be one by chance. But it did show how simple and cost efficient usability tests could be carried out for projects that have budget constraints and tight deadlines. People like Jakob Nielsen have been harping on this for years, but the true value of simple methods such as paper prototyping can only be understood once you do it and see the results for yourself.

Live redesigns

Another advantage of paper prototyping is you could make quick changes based on user input and see how the new interfaces are received. Since paper prototyping happens at the beginning of a project, the cost of throwing away is minimal. In fact, almost always you’ll have to throw away your first few attempts. That’s a very small price to pay for the guaranteed improvements in usability.

Towards the end of our session, the client was the one talking and sketching, and we were the ones listening. Much of the upcoming revamped design of the application would be directly from the sketches of our client rather than our genius designers.

Test early, test often

Our attempt at genius design wasn’t a total failure: a lot of other sections of the application were readily accepted, and some are already implemented. But, we’ve learnt our lesson from this meeting: the genius designer is a myth. Unless, of course, you’re Jonathan Ive.

As Steve Krug says in Don’t Make Me Think, testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none. Our first test wasn’t even intended, but surely it won’t be the last.

Your designer is not three years old.
Talking to a friend of mine who works in the art department at an ad firm, he said that what annoys him the most is when copywriters treat him like an infant. In general, I think this is a big complaint among designers everywhere. As a writer myself, I believe that your copy briefs should never tell the designer what to do or how to do it. In the very least, your visual suggestions should be the beginning of a conversation, not the delivering of an order.

Instead of suggesting,

A yellow background with black lettering and a white border.

Try saying,

I feel a light background with dark lettering would suit this best. What do you think?

You will need to edit, and re-edit – it’s your job.
Part of being a good writer means you think that your work is flawless. Of course, it’s also essential to know at the back of your mind that it is not so. Authors have editors, reporters have editors, and you have an editor as well – yourself. When your manager sends back some copy saying he’d like some edits, don’t take it personally. In fact, these changes are often not corrections to mistakes you’ve made, they’re just slight shifts in tone and voice as required by your team.

You will never have total creative license.
This is the real world. If you want total freedom, it’s best to start penning that maiden novel. Out here, there are deadlines to meet, clients to please, and someone, somewhere is going to ask you to be a little more formal. When this happens, don’t take it personally – it’s not an indictment on your talent, just a little reminder that Tolkien didn’t write corporate copy. Though being creative is an essential part of being a good writer, knowing when to draw the line is a skill that is far more valuable.

Coming to terms with these three points helped me a lot during my first few years of writing professional copy, and my hope is that they will help you too. Good writers are born, not made, and though nobody can teach you good writing, you can unteach yourself bad writing. Live, learn, and write – never stop learning, never stop writing, and when you find something new, share it with others. There are too few of us not to.

Suba Aluth Avuruddak Weva!

Apart from stepping in to a New Year however, something else happened last week, and something pretty awesome at that. Three of our very own were selected for Google Summer of Code 2007.

Over the next few months, Amila, Lakshan and Laknath are going to spend their time working for three FOSS projects.

Amila will be putting together a new core theme for the popular CMS Drupal, while Lakshan will be hacking some web mashup goodness for SilverStripe, a newer CMS. Finally, Laknath will be working with the people at Gnome to put together a new document editor for Project Mallard.

So, congratulations guys - we’re really excited for you. In fact, we haven’t been this excited since we first got broadband. Here’s to a summer of squashed bugs, completed milestones, and lots of good, solid, code.