I’m starting to gear up for some personal tech projects – there’s a number of itches I want to scratch, and the itch is getting stronger. Part of the motivation was running across the “12 factor app” website a few days ago, and thinking about how to design modern IT and web services. Anyone who works in IT doing app or website development, please take a look. Much like RESTful API development, this isn’t a how-to, but more of a cultural framework of why you should build you apps in specific ways. A lot of it has to do with preparing yourself to scale out instead of up, and help you retain service and platform portability.