In case you missed the tweet last week, we added Chef support to Blueprints. If you're just getting started with infrastructure automation tools, it can be daunting. Blueprints are an easy way to jumpstart your efforts. A blueprint figures out what you did to a server and converts that information into a Puppet or Chef config file or a POSIX Shell script. We had a great conversation with Adam Jacob, CTO of Opscode, and hope to add more Chef integration soon. Ping us with any questions!

On another note, we've updated our home page based on your feedback. We hope it more clearly explains the DevStructure workflow. We understand that our customers are investing time in learning our tools and are extremely grateful that you're helping us make it easier for others to join the club. Thank you!

This afternoon we pushed a few final commits, nixed the invite codes, updated the documentation, looked left, looked right and cautiously emerged from our beta shell. Virtual high-fives for all and a huge thank you to our early testers for their invaluable feedback. If you didn't get a chance to kick the tires, no worries - the first month is free and you can sign-up here.

DevStructure is about making the development process better, not different. Everyone has their favorite editor or IDE and a comfortable workflow centered around it that makes them happiest. We want to make DevStructure fit naturally into every workflow, bringing configuration management along for the ride.

To that end, we've evaluated many of the market's solutions for remotely editing source code and found ourselves wanting something more.

The class of software we'll call remote editors generally suffers from performance problems. Because all filesystem operations incur a network round-trip, operations like searching your entire project or browsing the entire directory tree are too slow to be used frequently. This category includes editors like BBEdit, Sublime Text, and gedit plus software like Expandrive, Transmit, and SSHFS.

Software like Dropbox performs more favorably because it sychronizes a local copy of your files with the remote copy by way of their service. It's fast and reliable but, like many of the best software above, doesn't always come free.

The choice of workflow and software you use alongside DevStructure will always be yours and today we're adding a new choice in the form of a free, open-source file syncing utility called Doubledown for Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.

Download Doubledown 0.0.1 0.0.2 for Mac OS X 10.5 and newer

Doubledown keeps a complete local copy of the remote directory you're syncing so all your local operations are lightning fast. After it performs an initial sync (being careful not to clobber any local changes), Doubledown is notified of changes by Mac OS X's FSEvents framework and responds by creating, uploading, and removing files or directories as required.

Check out doubledown(1) and the source code on GitHub.

Today we're happy to announce support for two developer favorites: Slicehost and Linode. We have tremendous respect for the Slicehost and Linode communities and are anxious to get their feedback. If you're a patron of either and interested in joining our beta, let us know. Speaking of the beta, it's diamonds (sorry I just wanted to use that phrase). We now support Rackspace Cloudservers, Amazon EC2, Slicehost, Linode and the catch-all Bring-Your-Own-IP. Richard and I are now setting our sights on generating more blueprints, working remotely with DevStructure and Chef exports (we already support Puppet and POSIX Shell). As always, we are dedicated to simplifying your dev experience. Lastly, a big thank you to all of our users who are helping us put DevStructure through its paces.