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Name: Robert Blanckaert
Hometown: Davison, MI
Blog: Basicer
Application currently hosted on OpenShift: chessgears.com
Technologies used: Mongo, PHP, C
What's it do?
An interactive chess games/openings explorer.
What motivated you to create the application?
Partly an episode of radiolab. Also because there are a lot of websites that charge monthly for this information past a given search depth and dont have an interactive board. It seemed like access to this information should be free, as part of the growing pool of knowledge surrounding chess (think wikipedia).
What are the most compelling features of OpenShift?
It's the only free platform (that I know of) that gives developers earnest access to mongo-db. I had started this project a few months before I discovered openshift, but abandoned it to due how hard it was find a cost effective way to maintain such a large mongodb database. I was against trying to monetize the project at all, but couldn't
cover the cost of getting a dedicated box capable of running mongo.
What are some features you'd like to see in OpenShift?
More flexibility in shell access. Because I'm often rebuilding the datasets from scratch using my game analysis pipeline I spend a lot of time hanging out on the shell. It took a lot of investment to get an environment that I could run my scripts in naturally. The biggest problem to this end in my opinion is the absence of the screen utility. It crashes on the long guid based usernames.
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