It’s been 6 months since I started Cynapta so I thought I will share with you about what I have been up to for last 6 months and some more details about Cynapta and what we have been doing there.
Cynapta – What’s that?
Well, Cynapta is the name of the new company I founded after Cerebrata. A lot of folks asked me how I come up with such quirky names
. Well, the answer is rather simple – all the good names have already been chosen so I am left with such names only. I wanted a small name which is somewhat catchy and I could not come up with a better name than this. Plus the domain name was also available .
What we’ll be doing @ Cynapta?
That’s a million dollar question. I’m still not ready to spill all beans but there’re a few things I can share – At Cynapta, we are building some Software as a Service (SAAS) applications. They will be hosted in Windows Azure. We have some really interesting products in the pipeline (yes, we have over 2 years of product pipeline ) and all of them will be for cloud platforms, primarily Windows Azure but we’ll dabble into other cloud platforms as well. Windows Azure has come a long way since its inception in 2008 and is growing stronger day-by-day however there are lots of “partner opportunities” in the platform. To begin with, we will explore these “partner opportunities” and come up with solutions for those.
At Cerebrata, we focused mainly on building desktop tools but at Cynapta the focus will be on building web-based applications. No particular reason other than the fact that for the kind of applications we are building, it made sense for us to make them as web-based applications instead of desktop applications.
We are more or less done with a major part of our first application and hopefully we will do a beta very soon – in a month or so. I will come back here to seek your participation in beta testing. Here’s a screenshot of what we are building:
What else @ Cynapta?
Well, apart from making the applications ready for beta, we need to get a blog up and running. In past few months, we as a team have learnt immensely about Windows Azure and would want to share those learning with you. We will blog about the architecture of our applications, try to walk you through the process we went through on making those architecture decisions and building the products. Being a commercial entity, it may not be possible for us to share source code but wherever we can, we will share the source code.
Team @ Cynapta
we are now a strong team of 8 people. Unlike Cerebrata where I started with all fresh graduates, this time we have a mix of experienced developers and freshers. Freshers still amaze me with the energy and thoughtfulness while the experienced developers in my team have a very open mind so that’s a very good thing for me. Only guy in the team with rigid thoughts is me so I need to work on that.
Here’s a picture of the team @ Cynapta.
What Else?
Oh, we have a twitter account for ourselves. Handle for that account is @cynapta. I would appreciate if you could start following it. Currently it does not do anything but I promise it will be active very soon as that would become the official medium for all news about Cynapta.
Personal Stuff
On the personal front, things have started to become crazy (in a good way) . In past 6 months, I did some consulting work; worked with a bunch of super smart students from my alma mater to help them create a WordPress backup to Windows Azure plugin; hung out at Stack Overflow trying to grab as much +10s and +15s as I can . I was hanging there so much that one of the fellow Windows Azure MVP wondered if I am planning on building a business out of it . Jokes apart, its fun to hang out there. You get to learn so many things and it feels great when you end up helping somebody out. Another reason for hanging out at Stack Overflow is that it gives to great ideas about what kind of products one should build. Folks come there with problems for which no solution exist today. For us, that place is like a gold mine of ideas.
Apart from that I learnt a lot of new stuff: Cloud Architecture, ASP.NET MVC 4, jQuery, Knockout.js etc. etc. Fun stuff!!! Wrote a lot of code (I mean really a lot of code ) as well.
Closing Thoughts
All in all last 6 months have been pretty exciting. There’re still a lot of uncertainties but what’s life without some unpredictability. I’m really looking forward to the challenges that lie ahead of us.
Wish us luck!!!
