A good read. So you used to work in the US, but you were born in Turkey and now live/work in the Netherlands? You sure do move about ;-) How do you like working in Amsterdam vs the US?

I've never worked in the US.

Ah, I just assumed you quit your US job and talked with a US immigration lawyer about a US entrepreneurship visa.

I would definitely not return back from US to Netherlands to start a company :)

Wow.. quote of the day!! "Happiness is not external. Happiness is a perception. Happiness is within. It's up to you. You either choose to be happy or not. Yes, that simple."

Glad you liked it.

I noticed in the blog post you started with RoR but now you're looking for Python/Tornado devs? What happened there to make you switch?

My co-founder was very experienced in php, so we said, lets find the middle and pick Python. Of course that's not the only reason. Python has great packages text processing (esp NLTK) and we really liked the simplicity

Btw, we did not started Followords with RoR. Started with Python/Tornado from scratch

Oh. I assumed you started with RoR since that's what you mentioned in the post. How would you compare development between RoR and Tornado?

I mentioned RoR, because that was what I've used in my previous project.

RoR's learning curve is much more higher than Tornado. I don't even think that is fair to compare those two. IMHO, RoR is more suitable for apps that requires lots of objects, views, etc.. E.g: A business app or a website.

In our case, we don't have that many tables, but lots of code around it and our app also runs on top of a single page. All the rest is taken care via AJAX.

One more factor in our decision was simplicity. You can easily dive into Tornado's code ( web.py ) and understand, whereas in RoR you need to read a lot of code, and Ruby is also making it harder to find out the flow of the code with its advanced concepts ( was called extends I believe )

And I am not a big fan of Active Record as well. We use PyMongo to communicate directly with MongoDb.

Tornado's Asynchronous abilities also an advantage.

Also I did not have that much of experience to use RoR in full scale, and if I got stuck on something, I need to read a lot and I don't like that.

Interesting. Those are all reasons I've stuck with Python frameworks over RoR as well, although I haven't used Tornado. Thanks for the opinions.

I see that you have more opportunities in Netherlands than Turkey for a startup.

broken image on your site - http://followords.com/static/img/followords_on_ipad.png

thanks zoidb

Good post, encouraging

thanks ozuolmez