Our Blog

Vue and Ecommerce: An Introduction

By Steph Skardal
February 19, 2018

I speak the domain specific language of ecommerce, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and jQuery. Lately, I’ve been getting up to speed on Vue.js. I’ve been working on writing a small ecommerce site using Vue.js, because for me, creating an application addressing familiar paradigm in a new technology is a great way to learn.

Vue.js, initially released about 3 years ago, is a lightweight JS framework that can be adopted incrementally. In the case of my small example site, Vue.js serves the frontend shop content and connects to a decoupled backend that can be run on any platform of choice. On my path to get up to speed on Vue, I found great resources that I wanted to write about before I get into the details of my ecommerce app. Here they are:

• First, I started with the Vue.js documentation. The documentation is great as a starting point to understand some of the terminology. I often don’t love the documentation that comes with technologies, but I found the Essentials section in the Vue documentation to be a great launching point.
• After I worked through some of the Vue.js documentation, I did a simple search for “vue jsfiddle” and experimented with a few of those fiddles. Having come from a …

Sunsetting Piggybak, A Ruby on Rails Ecommerce Gem

By Steph Skardal
February 14, 2018

Hi there! I’m Steph, the original creator and not-very-good maintainer of Piggybak, a modular ecommerce platform written in Ruby on Rails. With the help of End Point, I created Piggybak after building a custom Ruby on Rails ecommerce application for one of our clients here at End Point.

My goal with Piggybak was to create a lightweight, modular ecommerce platform in the form of a Ruby on Rails gem that could be combined with other Ruby on Rails gems for quick setup. Over the years, End Point has had much success working in Interchange, an ecommerce framework written in Perl. The web stack has evolved greatly over the years, as has the capacity for modularity and the ability to decouple front-end and back-end architecture.

Fast forward about 4 years after Piggybak was released, and we’ve decided to retire it. Not only did I leave the maintenance up to End Point after I left to work as an in-house software engineer for the last couple of years, but I was also in a position to evaluate using Piggybak as the base for a custom solution.

While I think there are some great Ruby on Rails gems to help support your ecommerce application (see below), one of the main things I realized was …

Liquid Galaxy at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics

By Dave Jenkins
February 13, 2018

The Winter Olympics are in full swing in Pyeongchang, Korea! We’re proud to note that we have a full Liquid Galaxy running onsite there as well.

Our Seoul-based partner, AZero, has been working closely with KEPCO, the Korean power company, to bring Liquid Galaxies to several of their visitor centers scattered throughout South Korea. KEPCO utilizes the Liquid Galaxy to showcase their infrastructure elements of hydroelectric dams, large power stations, and substations to show how they bring electricity to the 40M+ people living in South Korea.

As a lead corporate sponsor of the games, KEPCO wanted to bring that same story to the Olympic venues. AZero developed new content that highlights the Olympic venues and Pyeongchang area and deployed the Liquid Galaxy at the Gangneung branch office (near Pyeongchang, and also a host of several Olympic venues).

Now that the games are in full swing, KEPCO is bringing VIPs, government officials, and a global list of business contacts to their center, and is using the Liquid Galaxy as the central platform to present their accomplishments.

If you’re in Pyeongchang, why not take some time to see this incredible immersive platform?

End Point is …

Regionation with PostGIS

By Josh Tolley
February 8, 2018

Recently a co-worker handed me a KML file and said, in essence, “This file takes too long for the Liquid Galaxy to load and render. What can you do to make it faster?” It’s a common problem for large data sets, no matter the display platform. For the Liquid Galaxy the common first response is “Regionate!”

Though your dictionary may claim otherwise, for purposes of this post the word means to group a set of geographic data into regions of localized objects. This is sometimes also called “spatial clustering” or “geographic clustering”. After grouping objects into geographically similar clusters, we can then use the KML Region object to tell Google Earth to render the full detail of a region only when the current view shows enough of that region to justify spending the processing time. Although the “Pro” version of Google Earth offers an automated regionation feature, it has some limitations. I’d like to compare it to some alternatives available in PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

Data sets

For this experiment I’ve chosen a few different freely available datasets, with the aim to use different geographic data types, distributed in different ways. First, I found a database of 49,000 on-shore …

New Tools — Old-Fashioned Project Management

By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
January 24, 2018

Photo by Kennisland, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped

In the last year at End Point, I’ve managed projects in Trello, JIRA, Redmine, Basecamp, RT (Request Tracker) and a few others. The market of project management tools is wide and varied…​and they are all great. Well, maybe that’s a topic for another post.

However, I’ve been thinking lately—​as I kick off yet another project—​that no matter what tool you use for managing your project there are some fundamentals you should never forget. For those of you deep in the mud of project management tools I have some reminders for you:

Communicate with your client

No matter what tool you use to manage development, don’t let fancy apps or tools take the place of actual one-on-one time with your client. Hearing from them in their own voice about their needs and how the project affects their business and goals is invaluable. No project can succeed without the stakeholder’s vision.

Don’t stop talking to your client once the proposal is written or the project scope is done…​create a way to talk to them often. Talking to your client can take many forms, but an old-fashioned phone call is always a good way.

Show measurable progress

I have noticed that the …

YouTube Algorithms, Engagement, and You

By Cody Ressler
January 24, 2018

Photo by Garry Knight, CC BY 2.0, modified

As we move into 2018, it is important to understand how algorithms have automated much of what we see when browsing websites such as YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

While YouTube is certainly facing its fair share of controversies and criticism¹, it is unlikely that YouTube will be toppled as the predominant video entertainment source for the current generation of young adults and children within the next five years. With that in mind, it is important that we can understand just how YouTube decides both what videos it thinks you should be seeing and how it places ads on those videos.

So many videos!

YouTube is currently experiencing a glut of uploads and content—​with over 400 hours of video uploaded each minute²—​and it can be difficult to have a video pick up traction within this never-ending barrage of uploads. While most of the videos you may see on YouTube have view counts ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions, the average view count for videos in the tech sector is just around 6,500—​and even this is much higher than the median view counts.

Many videos uploaded to the service do not utilize techniques to maximize …

Regular Expression Inconsistencies With Unicode

By Phineas Jensen
January 23, 2018

A casual stroll through the world of Unicode and regular expressions—​Photo by Presidio of Monterey

Character classes in regular expressions are an extremely useful and widespread feature, but there are some relatively recent changes that you might not know of.

The issue stems from how different programming languages, locales, and character encodings treat predefined character classes. Take, for example, the expression \w which was introduced in Perl around the year 1990 (along with \d and \s and their inverted sets \W, \D, and \S).

The \w shorthand is a character class that matches “word characters” as the C language understands them: [a-zA-Z0-9_]. At least when ASCII was the main player in the character encoding scene that simple fact was true. With the standardization of Unicode and UTF-8, the meaning of \w has become a more foggy.

Perl

Take this example in a recent Perl version:

use 5.012; # use 5.012 or higher includes Unicode support
use utf8;  # necessary for Unicode string literals

print "username" =~ /^\w+$/; # 1
print "userاسم"  =~ /^\w+$/; # 1

Perl is treating \w differently here because the characters “اسم” (“ism” meaning “name” in Arabic) definitely …

Enhancing Your Sites with Vue.js

By Greg Davidson
December 26, 2017

Framework Fatigue

When developers consider and evaluate front-end frameworks they often think in terms of writing or rewriting their entire project in Framework X. “Should we use Vue, React, Preact?” or “I heard about Sapper the other day, has anyone tried that?” The running joke response (back-end developers especially love this one) is to the effect of: “If we wait a couple weeks there will be ten more choices!”

All joking aside, frameworks like Vue and React offer many great benefits and can be incrementally adopted to enhance existing sites. There is no need to rewrite your entire project as a Single Page Application to take advantage of what frameworks like Vue offer. I have taken this approach on a couple of my projects recently and been very happy with the results.

Start Small

One of the benefits of using a framework in this way is that you’re not forced to adopt its entire toolchain and specific workflow immediately, such as using ES6/2015, webpack, and Babel right off the bat. I simply loaded the minified, minimal version of Vue I needed on my page and I was off to the races.

If you are familiar with Angular, Vue has a similar concept of custom directives. I used this to …