I am Chris Chinchilla 👋

Welcome to a new newsletter/post/radar/term-yet-to-be-defined from me that I have been planning for ages. I intend it to be something of a round up of tools and services i’ve been trying recently, plus also industry analysis and trends. To begin with it’s just the tools and service round up as the analysis part requires more thought that I haven’t had time for yet.

When the modern-day internet began emerging in the early 2000s, finding hosting services and resources to run the new wave of dynamic web applications was hard. You needed a database to store application data. These were slow, expensive, and unreliable, regularly bringing applications to a grinding halt when a single instance failed. You needed a server to run interpreted languages like PHP, Python, or Ruby. These were equally expensive, often needed configuration, had security issues, and frequently ran out of memory or CPU resources, again bringing applications to a grinding halt.

Changes in recent versions of macOS have made running macOS and Linux virtual machines far easier and more performant. Primarily used for testing, a plethora of new applications that take advantage of these features emerged, so when Mac Stadium released a free desktop version of their long-running Okra range of virtualisation tools, one feature in particular stood out to me as something different and potentially useful.