As the holiday’s and new year approach and to fulfill my commitment of being open, I thought it would be good to do a quick post updating everybody on Moncaí. We all know that 2011 is the year of the rabbit, but I hope it can also be known as the year of the Moncaí. I’m sorry, but I can’t wait until 2016 to release, but it would of been awesome if it turned out that way! ;-) Although it might seem like I’m not doing anything from the outside, however the last few months have been actually quite intense as I ramp up to begin the private beta. :-)

I posted the announcement on Moncaí a little over a month ago not really thinking it would catch on so fast. I wanted to gauge the interest from the community before I took my little proof of concept to a fully supported service. I created a landing page with the amazing guys over at Fixel containing a private beta sign-up form. I tweeted about the post and it grew from there. I also did an interview with the guys over at Herding Code as a last minute interview, to hopefully fill in some blanks and provide more information on the announcement and what Moncaí is and isn’t.

I then decided to take a personal approach to replying to everybody who was signing-up for the private beta. That took some time, but it was well worth it and received. You can read more about it in a previous post.

I am happy to report that quite a few of you are interested in participating in the private beta! Now that I have a good pool of user’s willing to participate, I can begin ramping up for the beta. I have been spending the past month on putting all the necessary internal processes in place to send out the invites. The goal is to make everything as smooth as possible for you guys. It will be as easy as clicking a link in the email to activate your account with directions on where to go from there and you’ll be pushing your first application within minutes of activation. My goal is to begin sending out the initial invites towards the end of January with full documentation on what is available at the time. Also, the web application for the administration side of Moncaí will be functional only and not fully designed yet. I wanted to get everything to you guys as soon as possible. Let me know how you feel about this decision? I will be posting from time to time updating you guys on the progress and also even photos of the hardware. Once the beta begins, I plan on writing up another blog post explaining how Moncaí works internally, for those who want more details as I can’t give too much away right now.

We’re already gearing up to make 2011 an awesome year to be a .NET/Mono web application developer and hopefully bring some new user’s into our awesome community and ecosystem as well. I’m already planning for more podcasts for 2011 and maybe you’ll catch me at some events. Other than that, I’ll be cranking away on Moncaí based on feedback received in the beta working towards that day we can say we’re in production.

Until then, I wish everybody a happy holiday and new year! See you next year! ;-)