Nikhil Palanki

I've always been fascinated by the intersection between human phenomena and computing, specifically in fields of education, financial markets, and creative design. My programming interests are in machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, cryptography, blockchain infrastructure, market making, simulation and modeling, and quantum computing. Outside of ByteRevel, I co-founded and spent four years working on a software consulting company, Quadral Apps (It's now defunct as the founders have all left). My interests outside of computer science are poverty alleviation, humanitarian engineering, education, financial markets and economics research.

Terminal – New Online Computing Environment

1 minute read

While CodeBunk and Neutron Drive have free and accessible online developing environments, they lack a certain robustness characteristic of offline computing. Terminal is a new online computing environment that seeks to provide fast and powerful tools for deploying applications, testing software, and executing computations via external servers. Developers face the hassle of setting up environments on their desktop that hinder the computer from being used in other contexts (without stripping the environment). In many cases, multiple servers, IDEs, and chats may be open as coworkers collaborate and rush to finish projects. This can be a quite cluttered desktop environment. Terminal seeks to provide a powerful online environment to allow users to run their environments off of external machines.

Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 2.01.51 PM

Terminal’s home page. Looks like Bootstrap.

Here are a few unique features that Terminal offers:

1. Servers

Users are given the opportunity to use environments known as Terminal instances. These are essentially virtual machines that allow users to run applications on a remote server.

2. Environments

Terminal functions like any other desktop. It’s an all-inclusive environment that boasts support for a wide-variety of languages. Computing power can be resized without a need to restart the server.

3. Snapshots

Snapshots are exactly as they sound: pictures. They are pictures of the running state of virtual machines. They let you compare various environments and reload past set-ups.

4. Fast, Easy, and Efficient

Terminal boasts a 5 second start-up time, wide scalability (you can choose how much RAM and CPU power you use for your given project and you’re charged accordingly), and ease of application deployment. Terminal can be used as a powerful collaborative tool as well.

Altogether, Terminal is worth checking out if you’re a developer getting frustrated with the accumulating clutter on your desktop.

If you’re interested in checking out this new type of environment, you can find it here.

 

 

 

 

Leave a Comment

You May Also Enjoy

The Growth of Sharing Services

2 minute read

Over the past few years, the tech sector has seen an emergence of, for lack of a better term, “sharing services,” or companies that network and rent out dist...