Our Blog

Chef and Puppet Overview

By Josh Tolley
June 13, 2012

I started a job several years ago as a “configuration manager”, but had to admit when I started that I didn’t have any idea what “configuration management” really meant. The idea, as I soon learned, was to make sure all the servers, configurations, accounts, and other components of a system work together systematically. I’m not sure “configuration management” tools as such existed at the time, but we certainly never used them, though they’d begun to have a presence online before leaving that job for another opportunity.

In systems we run at End Point, whether for ourselves or other clients, such configuration management tools have become critical, in particular for our Liquid Galaxy systems, which require a great deal of repetitive configuration.  So Kiel and Josh Williams have a fair bit of experience with these tools, and I was glad to hear their discussion of Chef and Puppet specifically.

These tools have a common heritage, and are both Ruby-based. Ruby is a particularly good language for writing domain-specific languages (DSLs) like the one Puppet uses, so it’s interesting that Chef’s developers apparently abandoned the DSL idea, so Chef instructs its users run Ruby directly. …

End Point’s Ruby Slippers

By Kiel Christofferson
June 13, 2012

The next presentation of the day was Brian Dillon’s, entitled “End Point’s Ruby Slippers”.

Even as a relatively new End Point employee (3 months now), Brian has been assisting the growth of End Point in pursuit of sales and marketing. Brian started out by letting his fellow employees know that he finds himself very fortunate to have such a gold mine of unsung talent, expertise, and marketable skill at his disposal. Tortured with the thought of not fully representing that talent, Brian has been boiling a pot of ideas that might help him tell the world who End Point is and what we really do in an accurate and concise way.

After reading aloud each employee’s “one sentence” (written upon note cards) attempting to describe End Point, Brian took us all through a little bit of company history he had dug up from the archives. We received an overview of what End Point has done since 1995. A pattern emerged; End Point is not afraid to take interesting chances. End Point is not afraid to venture into the unusual projects that result from discussion between innovative minds. End Point is not afraid to increase the breadth of their knowledge while sharing that knowledge internally in order to …

Git Workflows

By Mike Farmer
June 13, 2012

David Christensen is talking today about Git workflows.

There are different ways that you can work with Git. Git doesn’t dictate a certain workflow so you are free to implement one that works best for you. Understanding git and how it works will help you develop an effective workflow.

The Git object model provides Git’s flexibility and is as follows:

• trees, blobs
• commits
• named commits: tags, branches

Branch flexibility comes through combining of branches (merges, rebase).

Good commits are key to flexibility/tools and should encapsulate the smallest logical change and a good log message describing the commit. It’s important to provide the why in your commit message in addition to what was fixed so that it’s clear to future developers.

Branches contain all the magic of Git in that it’s just a pointer to a commit.

Topic branches are convention driven branches that are merged off the master branch. They usually deal with a single topic and can be rebased onto master to provide a clean history. They can also be thrown away later so they don’t clutter up the repository.

Integration branches are usually for different levels of the application integration, for example, staging and …

Integration Experiences

By David Christensen
June 13, 2012

Szymon Guz gave a talk which covered his experiences working for a large client on integrating an acquired business’ website and fulfillment processes into their existing backend and fulfillment systems.

He gave us a detailed overview of their existing shipping fulfillment infrastructure, along with specific technical issues he encountered when integrating with the fulfillment models of the additional website.

He also detailed some of the non-technical/project management challenges inherent when working with a large number of people on a project.

Interesting jQuery Modules

By Carl Bailey
June 13, 2012

Marina Lohova talked about her favorite jQuery modules. It was the last talk of the day and she did not have much time.

Her focus was on the functional plugins. Interesting modules that she mentioned include:

• Ajax PayPal Cart
• Sisyphus (uses HTML5 LocalStorage)
• jImpress (presentations)
• jPlayer (HTML5)
• ResponseJS
• lqTouch (adds mobile events like swipe)

Liquid Galaxy NYC Annual Meeting

By Steph Skardal
June 13, 2012

I’m here in NYC for End Point’s annual company meeting and I’m kicking off our live blogging! We hope to blog about several of the sessions during and throughout the company meeting to give you an idea of what we are sharing at the company meeting.

This first session is titled Liquid Galaxy past, present, and future. given by Ben. Liquid Galaxy is an immersive 360° Google Earth experience that has been leveraged for custom tours, GIS data, 3D models, and even video games. Here are a few of the things that Ben covered during his talk:

• past: Liquid Galaxy was created in 2009 as a Google 20% project and initially meant for enhancing Google Street View. With a few initial features, it picked up some momentum. Jason asked End Point if they would be interested in supporting Liquid Galaxy and Ben attended a conference to check it out. From there, End Point’s invested time and energy to build out the Liquid Galaxy side of the business and learned several valuable lessons during the initial installations. These lessons yielded improved technology for improved maintenance and support.
• present: The system is easier to deploy and has new features, such as a Google Earth tools, utilities for …

Paper Source Client Profile

By Adam Vollrath
June 13, 2012

I know Richard best from his sysadmin work on End Point’s Hosting Team. But I also worked with him for our client Paper Source, covered by his presentation at our company meeting today.

Paper Source began in Chicago back in 1983. Since then they’ve opened more brick and mortar stores every year, now up to 54. End Point is now maintaining their e-commerce store, which supplements these well.

Richard and his team have integrated Interchange with many other software packages, including Adobe’s Scene7, Authorize.net, Great Plains, Endeca, and CoreMetrics. This adds up to many scheduled cron jobs every night. We also handle hosting of the production and Camps development servers.

The Berkman Center projects

By Terry Grant
June 13, 2012

Brian Gadoury and his awesome socks gave a great and informative presentation on our client Berkman Center.

The Berkman Center’s mission is to explore and understand cyberspace; and to study its development, dynamics, norms and standards.

Brian’s first project was called Zone One that is a document repository tool that houses all of the electronic documents for use by Harvard. You can search by document name, tags, and content. Zone One is written using open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Solr, and DevCamps.

The application includes an array of features that allow you to interact with the search results and the documents themselves. Each entry can have detailed meta-data associated with it, that can be referenced by future users.

One of the nice features of Zone One is its upload feature. It allows you to drag and drop files into a section the form for upload. The upload interface also includes a very nice SFTP system that utilizes virtual users on the system you are uploading to, to manage the files being uploaded and connected to the entry you are creating.

Phase two of the project will include features to export to external repositories, a bulk import …