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In my first ever blog post I promised I would write about some tools I use in development. It’s about time I start living up to that. Today I’m going to write about SftpDrive. SftpDrive can save you 30 minutes a day and make your life easier. And you will notice results immediately. Really, you can download the free 6 week trial and notice results in just a little more time than it takes you to read this review. It is for Windows users only as of this writing, but a Mac version is in the works.

What is it? SftpDrive is a simple disk mapping utility. It maps an SSH drive to a Windows drive letter. Sound simple? It is. If you have a server, either at your home or pay for a dedicated or virtual dedicated one, you download SftpDrive, install it, and enter in the connection details for your SSH server.

What does it do? SftpDrive adds a drive letter to your “My Computer” screen. In my case, when I open up My Computer I see:

• C: (my laptop’s hard drive)
• D: (dvdr drive)
• E: (sd card drive)
• F: (hp recovery partition)
  And then the SftpDrives:
• W: (SeeMeWin Server 1)
• X: (SeeMeWin Server 2 - webserver)
• U : (Qduke, Duke Startup Challenge, & other sites on my virtual dedicated server)
• M: (internal SeeMeWin server)

So now I have access to all of my remote servers’ hard drives as if they were plugged directly into my computer. If you maintain websites, you’ll know how tedious it can be to manually download and upload files from your web directory. With SftpDrive, you open a file just as you would any file on your home computer, edit it, save and you’re done! No uploading or downloading.

Why do I love it? I love SftpDrive because it does its job so well! The concept and functionality are simple. Windows even has similar functionality built in(but Mapping drives on Windows does not use Sftp I’m pretty sure, just ftp). But nothing comes close to SftpDrive in terms of ease of use. You can set it up in less than a minute–literally. And it just works. I haven’t experienced one problem in the months I’ve used it. It has saved me lots of time and made me a much more productive developer. Also, because it has made secure, remote storage so easy, SeeMeWin now has an easy way for our team to collaborate using one file system.

Verdict: 9.5/10

I just got back to the office after spending a few hours at Startup Weekend Boston in Newton. The idea of the event is that a bunch of entrepreneurs and developers get together and go from idea to company in one weekend. Even if the companies don’t pan out, it’s a very interesting process that is a ton of fun. And it’s a great way to meet other people with similar entrepreneurial/web 2.0 interests. In my estimate over fifty very talented and nice people were in attendance and eager to work.

Unfortunately there came a point where we had to sign a contract to contribute. Normally I wouldn’t mind one bit, but due to other engagements I now have that are quite legally binding I figure I shouldn’t risk it. I felt if I wasn’t going to sign, it wasn’t fair for me to partake, so I went back to the office to catch the last part of Nick’s show on SeeMeWin(no winners tonight).

But I did stay long enough to witness the process of idea generation and selection. There were some great ideas. I would say 3-5 of them could have been terrific startups.

The group ended up deciding by a slim margin(1 vote) to build LaptopYoga. I have to be honest: I do not understand the idea. I am not going to call it a bad idea, because the high caliber of people supporting it must mean there is something there. But I didn’t get it right away. The great thing though is that I bet in two days it will be very clear why it’s a good idea and I’ll learn that I should have thought about it in a different way.

I wish them the best of success! And of course, the whole point is to build a community and the company is the secondary goal. With that I know they will succeed.

So apparently at around 1:30am there was a 2.5 Magnitude Earthquake in Littleton, MA. I have no idea where that is, but I’m guessing it’s someplace out west. Far enough away that we didn’t feel or hear anything in Boston. What was really interesting was nobody knew what the loud noise was and the police were getting 911 calls reporting plane crashes, buildings exploding etc. So the cops even sent patrol cars and helicopters to search for a big fireball or crash site. Eventually, they figured it out.

I’m guessed someone from the USGS is always on duty to make calls to local police stations in cases like these but I wanted to learn more. So I googled Earthquake. The second result was this page:

http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/

Wow! I can’t believe how many quakes hit California every, single, day. How cool would it be to do structural engineering in California? It certainly would never get boring.

The MIT $100K is hosting an Elevator Pitch contest this afternoon and SeeMeWin will be there! We’ll be making a pitch which, besides explaining what SeeMeWin is, will contain two new pieces of information: 1) we’ve opened our new office in Cambridge and 2) We’re hiring!

It should be fun and there may just be some scratching at the event.

If you’re in the area, drop by and cheer us on.

I just read a delightful personal essay of one young entrepreneur’s successful startup story. Thanks to HackerNews for the link:

Aaron Swartz: How to Get a Job Like Mine