Welcome to the Datonia development blog, where we’ll be recording our progress, documenting our learning process, and discussing the tech we’re using as we go from 0 to 60 — from vapourware to a live app — with our new web application.

I’ve named this blog Groundhog Day in honour of today’s holiday. It’s fitting that we’re launching our development blog today, because Datonia really feels like a do-over for us. If you’ve ever seen the movie named after today, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

During the “Web 1.0″ boom, we started a B2B dot-com that survived the bust unscathed and is still chugging along nicely and paying the bills. It’ll remain nameless for now, but probably not for long (there are no secrets on the web). In that world, where I still live 9-5, all of our coding effort goes into behind-the-scenes tools and private client apps that we can’t show off to the world.

We deliberately and consciously took a full-service, people-centric path with that business, an approach that meant it would never scale to web proportions: we’d never have 1,000 clients, let alone 100,000. And I don’t regret that… we paid off our mortgage a year ago, and we now employ five people. We have clients in the UK, Europe, Canada and the US, and we get to work on interesting projects in all sorts of industries. There’s no commute, and we can have lunch with our kids.

So life is good… but like most hard-core software developers, we’re never satisfied. We always wonder “What if?” and refactor, tweak, fiddle. We have ideas we want to explore, tools we want to build.

After watching the Web 2.0 buzz build — first to cliché, and then bubble proportions — we couldn’t sit still any longer. The dot-com déja vu is overwhelming… but at least this time around, some really useful and usable applications are being built, apps like Blinksale that serve a need well and will stand the test of time.

For the first time in years, we’re actually inspired by some of the new sites and apps we’re seeing out there. Not so much by the specific technologies behind them — no Ruby for me, thank you… and if I hear the word framework one more time, I think I’ll snap (more on that in another post, I’m sure). But people are out there pragmatically solving real problems, and that shouldn’t get lost in all the chatter.

Our business is a huge industry that could be better served. Our old firm (which, to be clear, we still own, love and work in), will never serve more than 0.01% of our market, one project at a time. So it’s time to join the current wave of niche problem-solvers who are driving the current productivity boom (YouTube aside, a productivity boost is really what’s going on, at least on the business side of Web 2.0).

So we’re going to build a new web app for all the clients who couldn’t afford or had never heard of our full-service solution. Parts of it will suck at first and then we’ll make them better. Hopefully some people will like it, talk about it, and help us improve it.

Hopefully it’ll go live later this year and be a big hit in our marketplace sometime next year. But it’s a whole lot of nothing at the moment, so I’d better get back to work.

If you’re still looking for something to read, I heartily recommend Paul Graham’s How To Make Wealth.

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