12 Nuts

When you see the words “I have an announcement…” on the internet it is usually followed by a request for something, like a plea to sign up for a bi-weekly newsletter on sourdough starters. There’s no such request here, so I won’t start with that. I’ll opt for “I have a confession…”. Yes, that’s much better, even more clickbaity, but less needy.

I have a confession

The confession is that things at VEEB Projects aren’t quite as unstructured as they might appear. Granted, we’ve been releasing products without a theme being obviously visible. It started off with Bitcoin tickers, and then turned into displays of various other things. There were lots of Raspberry Pi projects. Then there were some antique clocks. An open-source light-meter. All a bit confusing.

One pattern that has been emerging is that some of our newer products have ‘12 Nuts’ prefixing their name for no apparent reason. Why?

12 Nuts is the name we gave to the data analysis platform that we’ve been building in the background as we work. It’s essential to us that the things we build which use a connection to the fickle beast that is the internet, have a robust foundation. A foundation that we can control to make sure that they can be depended on, long term.

It’s in its infancy but 12nuts.io is already chugging away, serving over a million pages a month all over the world (see map). We built it to be scalable so that it can easily grow when it needs to.

Odd name. Origin Story:

The name stems from an overheard conversation by the pool at a swanky hotel in Ibiza. I’m not sure that is important, but it helps paint the picture. Think overpriced drinks, the smell of suntan oil, and the sound of the sea in the background.

A man and his wife are lounging side-by-side in silence, engrossed in their book and wellness magazine respectively. The woman looks up from her magazine and breaks the silence to tell the man:

“Did you know, that if you eat 12 nuts a day, it drastically reduces your risk of dementia, stroke and heart attack?”

The man lets out a sigh and puts down his book. He looks into the distance at the sea and asks in a voice that is tired and full of resentment:

“Where am I going to get 12 nuts??”

So why am I telling you this?

I like telling that story. That, and I wanted to make the 12 nuts label less cryptic. It’s the name we’ve given to a thing that reduces the risk of problems down the line. If you visit this website every now and again, you’ll be seeing more of it.

There will not be any changes to the amount of work we put into making new things, sharing ideas or maintaining/refining the things we’ve already made.