Xenon website

One thing I'm adopting from the start is to release as often as possible, even if its not even MVP.

So the first step is to get a base website up. http://xenon.figmentengine.com/ is the holding location, to make this work I've done a few things:

• Used Git for source control (with GitHub)
• Vim for editing
• S3 for static site hosting
• DYN for DNS (as figmentengine.com nameservers are DYN)
• Used http://www.favicon.cc/ to create a favicon (to stop 404 errors)

Disclosure: I work for Amazon Web Services, this blog however is personal and does not reflect my employer's views. I will be using AWS services as I know them well (and used them before working at AWS).

Generally I'm planning to build most of the code myself, rather than relying on libraries etc - this will change as I need to focus on the core concepts.

I will also be keeping track of the page performance, so the base website benchmarks at

• Load: 0.7s, TTFB: 0.29s, Start Render: 0.57s, Doc Complete: 0.7s, Fully Loaded: 0.7s

Next steps will be to put in place a CDN (CloudFront) to reduce global latency, and switch to Route 53 for DNS hosting. These two changes will also enable a slightly different approach to building websites, a mainly static website which is enriched with dynamic content.

Project code name 'xenon'

As with all my personal projects this one starts life with a name from the periodic table - this stops me spending too much time coming up with a name when I should be focused on the core idea.

However, my approach this time differs from my usual route, in that its much more undefined - I don't have a specific product in mind, or a defined end goal. It will however bring together a number of threads I've been thinking about for a number of years.

So watch this space for xenon featuring emergence, AI, visualization and an alternative computational model.

btw I do have a cool name for xenon, but I want to validate it matches what I actually build. My design is blank so far, so I don't want to create an artificial constraint.