Earlier this week Codaset.com, a software project management and code hosting site, officially left beta.  Joel Moss (@joelmoss), the creator of Codaset, agreed to answer some questions and absolutely carried this interview. 

Is there anyone else on the Codaset team?

Nope! Just little ole' me! I developed and designed everything you see and don't see.

What's your education and background?

I actually started out in sales straight from school, selling ads on the back of hospital appointment cards! I hated sales, and I was absolutely shit at it. But I manged to wing it for a few years until I discovered the internet. At that point I was hooked and taught myself how to build a site. That quickly turned into a $10,000 a month ad-supported business. But that was at the height of the dot-com boom, so didn't last too long. So I then turned to domain names and web hosting. I ran a successful web hosting business for 7 years, until I sold it a few years back. Since then I've been working freelance, and developing Codaset. I never completed any higher education, and am completely self taught, but I'm passionate about what I do, as I love doing what I do. I am very lucky that my job is my hobby.

What were the motivation and goals for this project when you first started?

I've used all sorts of source code and issue tracking tools in the past, but eventually settled on a mix of Trac and Github. Trac is probably one of the best open source bug tracking tools available, but is not particularly user friendly. It also doesn't support Git (not out of the box anyway). Github is great at source control and social coding, but their issue management leaves a lot to be desired. There is a reason why a lot of projects that are hosted on Github tend to go elsewhere for their bug tracking. Both of these tools are great at what they do, but that is usually just one thing. I got fed up with using several different tools. As Hannah Montana once said, I wanted the best of both worlds ;). And so Codaset was born. A software project management tool that I want, and that I use myself. Just this evening I deployed a small change to provide support for video embedding, simply because I needed to embed a Youtube video in a Codaset blog post.

What tools were used to make it happen?

The entire site is built with Ruby on Rails, with a selection of popular plugins. And obviously - as with Github - it revolves around Git. Data is stored in a MySQL database, and I wrote a bunch of other backend tools in Ruby. Ruby is definately my language of choice these days.

How long did it take to get where you are now? Did you take any funding on the way or is it entirely bootstrapped?

The idea really came to me in January of 2009, and I began coding it a month or two later. And if I remember rightly, I opened up a private beta sometime in August. And of course, it finally left beta just this past Monday (March 1st 2010). The entire project is bootstrapped, and to be honest, I'm not in this for the money. Codaset came out of a need that I had. An itch that needed scratching, and I'm loving it even now.

What type of success have you achieved to this point?

The project is still relatively unknown, although you can find Codaset on the official Git site http://git-scm.com/tools. The only mentions of Codaset have been on my blog (http://developwithstyle.com) and on Twitter. And that is pretty much how it will stay for the foreseeable future. I don't want to let this run away with itself, or for it to go too fast. Right now there are a little over 2000 registered users and they have created over 2000 projects. Maybe small, but I am really proud of that. I think my biggest success, has been how open I have kept the project. Yes, the code is all private, but from the start, Codaset's tickets have been completely public. Anyone can come along and create or update a ticket at any time. I use Codaset to build Codaset, which I think is brilliant. I've also tried to be as honest as I could, which has resulted in a few blog posts where lively discussions have taken place by the users of Codaset. And that is the best feedback any business owner could want.

Github is probably the most well known competitor. Name one reason that open source devs should use Codaset instead. What's the best argument to get a company to host use a private repo on Codaset over Github or their own setup?

As I already mentioned, Github is great at what they do, but they only do one thing great. Developers and designers have several projects that need more than just code hosting, and they don't want to visit or use several different tools to do that. That is just an avoidable inconvenience, and can also get very expensive. We want one tool for the job, and that is what Codaset aims to be.

Github has had some issues with downtime. What makes you confident that Codaset would be able to handle the growth if it receives the same type of interest?

Github has grown very fast, and I think that caught them by surprise, so they never had the right setup from the start. I was very aware of that when I started Codaset, so unusually for me, infrastructure has been one of my top priorities. Codaset was designed with scalability in mind. Whenever I need more space for git repos, all I have to do i plug in another server. And if I need the site to handle more traffic, again, I just need to add another server. The system has been designed to run across several different machines, and it is intelligent enough to recognise and work with that.

What is your plan to lure open source projects to Codaset? Do you have any ideas on how to market the site?

Open source or public projects will always be free on Codaset. I use open source software, and have contributed to several open source projects over the years, and love the open source community. So I don't want to charge you a penny to host and manage your open source projects at Codaset. Anyone can come along and create as many as they want. I also recognise the social aspect that Git and distributed source control encourages, so will be building on that in the coming months. I think developers have a natural desire to help other developers, and to be a part of a larger community. I want to help them with that.

As for marketing, I'm not going overboard as I need to stay in control. I'll keep blogging and tweeting, and talking about it to good people like yourself, and hope that it slowly builds from there.

Again, thanks to Joel.  I found his answers tremendously open and engaging.  I hope you take a few minutes to check out Codaset.com because it is amazing that one person could design and code that whole site.