Pat Allan, Creator of Thinking Sphinx and Flying Sphinx

Pat Allan turned his open source side project into a profitable Heroku Add-on. We talk about the advantages and disadvantages of building on another company's platforms, doing support for both open source users and paying customers, and some of the trickier parts of parlaying open source success into a profitable business venture.

• Freelancing Gods — Pat's personal web site.
• Thinking Sphinx — The open source gem for integrating Ruby and the Sphinx search engine.
• Flying Sphinx — Flying Sphinx is an add-on for Heroku that lets you use Thinking Sphinx (and thus, Sphinx) for all your search needs.
• Limbr — Limbr is a social impact startup on a mission to make mental health more acceptable and accessible.
• Drumknott — Drumknott provides hosted searching for your static Jekyll sites. All you need to do is connect things up via Javascript, and upload your page data to Drumknott's API.
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