Company Presentation: jQuery and Rails
By Steph Skardal
July 27, 2011
Yesterday, I gave a company presentation on jQuery and Rails. The talk covered details on how jQuery and Rails work together to build rich web applications, with a considerable amount of focus on AJAX methods. Check out the slides here:
One piece of knowledge I took away from the talk is how different the Rails 3 approach is for unobtrusive AJAX behavior using helpers like link_to_remote and remote_form_for. Mike Farmer made a recommendation to read the rails.js source here to see how onclick behavior is handled in Rails 3.
javascript jquery ruby rails
Rails Optimization: Advanced Techniques with Solr
By Steph Skardal
July 22, 2011
Recently, I’ve been involved in optimization on a Rails 2.3 application. The application had pre-existing fragment caches throughout the views with the use of Rails sweepers. Fragment caches are used throughout the site (rather than action or page caches) because the application has a fairly complex role management system that manages edit access at the instance, class, and site level. In addition to server-side optimization with more fragment caching and query clean-up, I did significant asset-related optimization including extensive use of CSS sprites, combining JavaScript and CSS requests where ever applicable, and optimizing images with tools like pngcrush and jpegtran. Unfortunately, even with the server-side and client-side optimization, my response times were still sluggish, and the server response was the most time consuming part of the request for a certain type of page that’s expected to be hit frequently:
A first stop in optimization was to investigate if memcached would speed up the site, described in this article Unfortunately, that did not improve the speed much.
Next, I re-examined the debug log to see what was taking so much time. The debug log looked like this …
performance ruby rails solr sunspot
Announcing pg_blockinfo!
By David Christensen
July 14, 2011
I’m pleased to announce the initial release of pg_blockinfo. It is a tool to examine your PostgreSQL heap data files, written in Perl.
Similar in purpose to pg_filedump, it is used to display (and soon validate) buffer-page-level information for PostgreSQL page/heap files.
pg_blockinfo aims to work in a portable and non-destructive way, using read-only “mmap”, sys-level IO functions, and “unpack” in order to minimize any Perl overhead.
What we buy for the compromise of writing this in Perl instead of C is two-fold:
-
portability/low impact — pg_blockinfo has no other dependencies than Perl and several core Perl modules and will work in environments where you can’t or won’t easily install other packages or compile based on specific headers.
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expressibility — while not currently supported in full, one of pg_blockinfo’s future goals is to allow you to specify criteria for display of both page-level and tuple-level info. It will allow you to define arbitrary Perl expressions to filter the objects you’re looking at (i.e., pages, tuples, etc; think “grep” but on a tuple level). It will support a DSL for querying based off of the named fields as well as allow you to supply arbitrary Perl …
database postgres tools
Raw Caching Performance in Ruby/Rails
By Steph Skardal
July 12, 2011
Last week, I set up memcached with a Rails application in hopes of further improving performance after getting a recommendation to pursue it. We’re already using many Rails low-level caches and fragment caches throughout the application because of its complex role management system. Those are stored in NFS on a NetApp filer, and I was hoping switching to memcached would speed things up. Unfortunately, my http request performance tests (using ab) did not back this up: using file caching on NFS with the NetApp was about 20% faster than memcached from my tests.
I brought this up to Jon, who suggested we run performance tests on the caching mechanism only rather than testing caching via full http requests, given how many layers of the stack are involved and influence the overall performance number. From the console, I ran the following:
$ script/console # This app is on Rails 2.3
> require 'benchmark'
> Rails.cache.delete("test")
> Rails.cache.fetch("test") { [SomeKlass.first, SomeKlass.last] }
> # to emulate what would potentially be stored with low-level cache
> Benchmark.bm(15) { |x| x.report("times:") { 10000.times do; Rails …performance ruby rails
Google+
By Steph Skardal
July 11, 2011
Over the weekend, I dug into Google+ a bit. I wanted to share a few notes about the experience with my coworkers and the world.
Speed
Google has done a great job on performance from what I can tell. They’ve followed their own recommendations on optimization by doing things like implementing CSS sprites, caching static assets, and gzipping content. I can’t do performance tests on my authenticated account at WebPageTest.org, but the perceived performance is great.
User Interface
Parts of the user interface look similar to Facebook. But Google deviated from their norm of utilitarian/pragmatic design according to this article, and I appreciate their focus on aesthetics here. This combined with the speed makes for a delightful user experience.
Circles
Google offers limited sharing functionality with what they call “Circles”, similar to Facebook groups. In my case, I have the following circles:
- Friends
- Family
- End Point
- Web People (professional contacts)
- Photography
Circles are integrated into every part of Google+, which makes it easy to limit posts, photos, videos or other content to individuals or circles. In addition to limiting sharing permissions, you can also limit viewing …
social-networks
Home router problems with .0 IP address
By Jon Jensen
July 1, 2011
In our work the occasional mysterious problem surfaces which makes me appreciate how tractable and sane the majority of the challenges are. Here I’ll tell the story of one of the mysterious problems.
In Internet routing of IPv4 addresses, there’s nothing inherently special about an IP address that ends in .0, .255, or anything else. It all depends on the subnet. In the days before CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) brought us arbitrary subnet masks, there were classes of routing, most commonly A, B, and C. And the .0 and .255 addresses were special.
That was a long time ago, but it can still cause occasional trouble today. One of our hosting providers assigned us an IP address ending in .0, which we used for hosting a website. It worked fine, and was in service for many months before we heard any reports of trouble.
Then we heard a report from one of our clients that they could not access that website from their home, but they could from their office. We couldn’t ever figure out why.
Next one of our own employees found that he could not access the website from his home, but he could from other locations.
Finally we had enough evidence when a friend from the open source community …
hosting networking
We are hiring: Ruby on Rails Developer
By Ron Phipps
June 24, 2011
This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.
Job Description:
End Point is looking for a talented software developer who can consult with our clients and develop their Rails web applications. We need someone that focuses on the client and will deliver quality, tested code.
About End Point:
End Point is a 15-year-old web consulting company based in New York City, with 20 full-time employees working remotely from around the United States. Our team is made up of strong e-commerce, database, and system administration talent that leverage a variety of open source technologies.
We service over 200 clients ranging from small mom and pop shops to large corporations. End Point continues to grow this year and we’re looking for intelligent and passionate people that want to join our team and make a difference. We prefer open source technology and do collaborative development with Git, GNU Screen, IRC, and voice.
What is in it for you?
- Work from your home office or our Manhattan based headquarters
- Flexible full-time work hours
- Strong balance of work and home life
- Bonus opportunities
- Health insurance benefits
- Ability to move without being tied to your job location
What you will be doing:
- Consulting with clients to determine their web …
ecommerce jobs-closed ruby rails
Competing with the big players in e-commerce
By Ron Phipps
June 20, 2011
While attending the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in San Diego last week I had a few moments to speak with Nathan Barling, the CTO for Shoebacca.com. During our conversation he mentioned he would be speaking at the conference in the track titled: “Small Retailers: Winning Strategies in a tougher market”. I attended his talk and was impressed by the things that Shoebacca is doing to appear larger then they are, which helps them compete with the big players in their industry such as Zappos. The tactics that Nathan discussed can be applied to many industries in e-commerce and for all sizes of businesses, even those on limited budgets.
One of the first things Nathan discussed was to make your policies clear and to highlight them on the site so that people are aware of the rules. Nathan recommends this, especially in the case of Shoebacca, where many of their policies encourage people to shop on their site, by reducing risk to the customer. Some of their policies include:
- Free ground shipping
- Free return shipping
- 365 day return policy
- 110% price match for 14 days
Nathan mentioned many 3rd party tools that they leverage at their company, along with open source tools they …
clients conference ecommerce open-source magento