Our Blog

Company Meeting Wrap-Up

By Steph Skardal
June 18, 2012

End Pointers at our annual company meeting!

Many of us End Pointers are back to work after last week’s annual company meeting of 2012 held in New York City. We attended a 3-day conference full of technical tips, client updates, and general company news. Everyone participated in live blogging during the conference, producing valuable documentation to allow us to revisit what was discussed. Here’s a list of all the articles in case you missed any, or felt overwhelmed by the articles in the RSS feed:

Developing a Spree Application

By Szymon Lipiński
June 15, 2012

Mike Farmer presented one of the projects he worked on. He gave us a very detailed overview of integration of a Spree application into Facebook for a large client.

He also described the changes that were made in the Spree project to customize it to the client’s needs.

The most interesting thing in this Spree shop usage is that the company’s clients make extensive use of the admin panel and they can sell their own products for other clients.

Mike showed us a great overview of writing better Rails applications using better object oriented code along with TDD and extensive SASS usage. He also described the great tools he uses including Screen and Vagrant.

Mike also talked about the things he learned during working on this project, especially about Spree and Ruby.

Interchange Caching Implementation Under Fire

By Adam Vollrath
June 15, 2012

Richard and David presented a recent case study on an e-commerce hosting client.

Several Interchange catalogs drive their individually branded storefronts, on top of a standard single-server LAMP stack boosted by an SSD drive.

Last year the sites came under an intense Distributed Denial of Service attack which lasted nearly two weeks. End Point responded immediately and soon engaged third-party DDoS mitigation firms. This experience later prompted an Interchange caching implementation.

Cache population and expiration is difficult for any dynamic web application using sessions, and doubly so for e-commerce sites. Every shopping cart needs a session, but delaying session creation until the first POST submission enables efficient caching for most of the sitemap. Other Interchange caching improvements made it back into the upstream code.

IPv6 Basics by Josh Williams

By Brian Gadoury
June 15, 2012

Josh Williams reviewed World IPv6 Launch that occurred on 2012-06-06. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook are some of the larger companies that launched on that date. While not exactly on the same scale, endpoint.com did a little over a year earlier.

As many of you may already know, the pool of (32-bit) IPv4 IP addresses that we’re all familiar with, has officially run out. IPv6, defined in 1998, has 128-bit addresses that are constructed by 8 hexadecimal segments.

What are some of the advantages of having the huge pool of addresses? Well, there’s really no longer any need for NAT—​everything becomes directly routable. IPv6 also gives us stateless auto-configuration that uses your MAC address to create your IPv6 address, so this means you’re that much more likely to be able to successfully get the same network address. IPsec is optionally built in to IPv6. (Optional because not everything truly needs IPsec.)

Not sure if your computer or mobile device is using IPv6 yet? Hit http://testipv6.com and it’ll tell you. Welcome to the future, finally.

Locate Express presentation

By Terry Grant
June 15, 2012

Jon Jensen gave a presentation about our client Locate Express, which is a locator service website that allows the user to instantaneously locate a professional in a specific area. The site was launched in 2011 and has been picking up in popularity ever since.

You can “Find a Pro”, as they put it, in three easy steps:

• Step 1, you select the service you are looking for. You can select anything from lawn care to plumbing.
• Step 2, you enter the address location you would like to locate the closest “pros” for the specified service.
• Step 3 shows you a list of pros for the selected service on a map. You can then select the pro of your choosing.

This is a very useful and easy to use service. I think Locate Express has great potential to catch on as it continues to gain traction, especially for service providers carrying “smart” mobile devices. In particular I think this will become more popular in utility emergencies on the weekends and after-hours, when it might be more difficult to find someone to fix your broken water pipe.

Popular Mobile Apps from Brian and Adam

By Steph Skardal
June 15, 2012

In our last lightning talk of the conference, Brian Dillon and Adam Vollrath shared some of their favorite mobile apps. Brian queried the room to see the phone type divide in the room. Here was our split: 33%—​iPhones, 33%—​Androids, 33%—​unsmart phones.

Brian likes pure simplicity for iPhone apps:

• Dropkick, categorization, syncing, require account creation
• Simplenote: same thing, but for notes

Adam has an Android “because Google owns him”:

• Google Goggles: Rumored Google technology is integrated into this. Google tries to ad-hoc identify logos, book covers, automatic translation of images, images, QR codes.
• K9 Mail: email client
• Andchat: IRC client
• WiFi Analyzer: provides site survey on network traffic
• SpeedTest

When not writing in Bash, Perl, Python, and Ruby we write in English: Writing Tips

By Brian Dillon
June 15, 2012

It is as important for our team to improve our skills writing for humans as it is writing code for computers, says our CTO Jon Jensen. He’s right. Thankfully he had a good list of tips for us to make our human writing as effective as our code.

Here are a few great gems:

• Don’t be afraid of bullet-points. ;-)
• Keep it short.
• Understand your audience.

Jon’s recommendations led to some End Pointers to share writing tips of their own:

1. Use the final thought of your first draft in the beginning of the final message.
2. Write out a lot, and cut down 90% of it.
3. When it comes to emails, lay out clear actionable steps you want a person to take in the beginning or in the last sentence of an email, not buried in a thick paragraph.
4. For important, longer documents, do editing the day after.
5. Re-read anything before you send it.
6. Reading what you’ve written out loud is great way to catch mistakes.
7. Have the wisdom to know when not to reply or send something.
8. Don’t be afraid to use the phone if your thoughts aren’t concise enough for an email.

World of Powersports Client Report

By Mike Farmer
June 15, 2012

World of Powersports is a family of websites that runs on Interchange. Carl Bailey describes how a few years after working on their initial website, World of Powersports came to End Point to develop a new website called Dealer Orders which has been very successful. This has allowed End Point the opportunity to work on several other related websites for the client.

Since then, we have worked on several other sites that have since been merged into one, Motorcycle Dealer.

All of the websites pull from a single database that is fed by various APIs from parts vendors such as Honda, Suzuki, and Polaris. This updates the inventory counts and other related information for all of the sites. It also interacts with online sites such as eBay, Google Base, and Amazon for checking part availability and pricing.

Implementing the interactions between these different entities has provided End Point with much of the challenge of these sites but continues to provide the client and customers with great value.