Our Blog

RailsConf 2015: Coming Soon

By Steph Skardal
April 17, 2015

Next week, I’m headed to my 6th RailsConf in Atlanta, with the whole family in tow:

The gang. Note: Dogs will not be attending conference.

This will be a new experience since my husband will be juggling two kids while I attend the daily sessions. So it makes sense going into the conference fairly organized to aid in the kid juggling, right? So I’ve picked out a few sessions that I’m looking forward to attending. Here they are:

• Don’t be a Hero: Sustainable Open Source
• Riding Rails for 10 Years
• Scaling Rails For Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Better Callbacks in Rails 5
• Microservices: A Bittersweet Symphony
• SVG Charts and Graphics with Ruby
• Building RailsPerf: A Toolkit to Detect Performance Regressions in Ruby on Rails Core
• High Performance APIs in Ruby Using ActiveRecord and Goliath
• What Comes After MVC
• Your Front End Framework is Overkill—​Server Side JavaScript with Rails
• Bringing UX To Your Code
• Coding: Art or Craft?
• What I’ve Learned in 7 Years of Podcasting About Ruby

RailsConf is a multi-track conference, with tracks including Distributed Systems, Culture, Growing Talent, Testing, APIs, Front End, Crafting Code, JavaScript, and Data & Analytics. There are also Beginner …

RubyConf India 2015

By Selvakumar Arumugam
April 15, 2015

The 6th edition of RubyConf India 2015 was held at Goa (in my opinion, one of the most amazing places in India). The talks were spread over various topics, mainly related to Ruby generally and RoR.

Aaron Patterson (a core member of Ruby and Rails team) gave a very interesting talk about Pair Programming, benchmarking on Integration tests vs Controller tests and precompiling the view to increase the speed in Rails 5.

Christophe Philemotte presented a wonderful topic on “Diving in the unknown depths of a project” with his experience of contributing to the Rails project. He mentioned that 85% of a developer’s time is spent on reading the code and 15% of the time is spent on writing the code. So he explained a work process plan to make use of the developer’s time effectively which should adopt well to any kind of development. Here is the list of steps he explained:

1. Goal (ex: bug fixing, implement new feature, etc… )
2. Map (ex: code repository, documentation, readme, etc…)
3. Equipment (ex: Editor, IDE) and Dive (read, write, run and use)
4. Next Task

Rajeev from ThoughtWorks talked about “Imperative vs Functional programming” and interesting concepts in Haskell which can be implemented in …

New NoSQL benchmark: Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase, Couchbase

By Jon Jensen
April 13, 2015

Today we are pleased to announce the results of a new NoSQL benchmark we did to compare scale-out performance of Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, Apache HBase, and Couchbase. This represents work done over 8 months by Josh Williams, and was commissioned by DataStax as an update to a similar 3-way NoSQL benchmark we did two years ago.

The database versions we used were Cassandra 2.1.0, Couchbase 3.0, MongoDB 3.0 (with the Wired Tiger storage engine), and HBase 0.98. We used YCSB (the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark) to generate the client traffic and measure throughput and latency as we scaled each database server cluster from 1 to 32 nodes. We ran a variety of benchmark tests that included load, insert heavy, read intensive, analytic, and other typical transactional workloads.

We avoided using small datasets that fit in RAM, and included single-node deployments only for the sake of comparison, since those scenarios do not exercise the scalability features expected from NoSQL databases. We performed the benchmark on Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances, with each test being performed three separate times on three different days to avoid unreproduceably anomalies. We used new EC2 …

Happy 10th birthday, Git!

By Jon Jensen
April 8, 2015

Git’s birthday was yesterday. It is now 10 years old! Happy birthday, Git!

Git was born on 7 April 2005, as its creator Linus Torvalds recounted in a 2007 mailing list post. At least if we consider the achievement of self-hosting to be “birth” for software like this. :)

Birthdays are really arbitrary moments in time, but they give us a reason to pause and reflect back. Why is Git a big deal?

Even if Git were still relatively obscure, for any serious software project to survive a decade and still be useful and maintained is an accomplishment. But Git is not just surviving.

Over the past 5–6 years, Git has become the standard version control system in the free software / open source world, and more recently, it is becoming the default version control system everywhere, including in the proprietary software world. It is amazing to consider how fast it has overtaken the older systems, and won out against competing newer systems too. It is not unreasonable these days to expect anyone who does software development, and especially anyone who claims to be familiar with version control systems, to be comfortable with Git.

So how did I get to be friends with Git, and end up at this birthday …

PgConf 2015 NYC Recap

By David Christensen
April 6, 2015

I recently just got back from PGConf 2015 NYC. It was an invigorating, fun experience, both attending and speaking at the conference.

What follows is a brief summary of some of the talks I saw, as well as some insights/thoughts:

On Thursday:

“Managing PostgreSQL with Puppet” by Chris Everest. This talk covered experiences by CoverMyMeds.com staff in deploying PostgreSQL instances and integrating with custom Puppet recipes.

“A TARDIS for your ORM—​application level timetravel in PostgreSQL” by Magnus Hagander. Demonstrated how to construct a mirror schema of an existing database and manage (via triggers) a view of how data existed at some specific point in time. This system utilized range types with exclusion constraints, views, and session variables to generate a similar-structured schema to be consumed by an existing ORM application.

“Building a ‘Database of Things’ with Foreign Data Wrappers” by Rick Otten. This was a live demonstration of building a custom foreign data wrapper to control such attributes as hue, brightness, and on/off state of Philips Hue bulbs. Very interesting live demo, nice audience response to the control systems. Used a python framework to stub out the …

Manage Python Script Options

By Szymon Lipiński
April 3, 2015

Some time ago I was working on a simple Python script. What the script did is not very important for this article. What is important, is the way it parsed arguments, and the way I managed to improve it.

All below examples look similar to that script, however I cut most of the code, and changed the sensitive information, which I cannot publish.

The main ideas for the options management are:

• The script reads all config values from a config file, which is a simple ini file.
• The script values can be overwritten by the command line values.
• There are special command line arguments, which don’t exist in the config file like:
  • –help — shows help in command line
  • –create-config — creates a new config file with default values
  • –config — the path to the config file which should be used
• If there is no value for a setting in the config file, and in the command line arguments, then a default value should be taken.
• The option names in the configuration file, and the command line, must be the same. If there is repo-branch in the ini file, then there must be –repo-branch in the command line. However the variable where it will be stored in Python will be named repo_branch, …

Impressions from Open Source work with Elixir

By Kamil Ciemniewski
March 26, 2015

Some time ago I started working on the Elixir library that would allow me to send emails as easily as ActionMailer known from the Ruby world does.

The beginnings were exciting—​I got to play with a very clean and elegant new language which Elixir is. I also quickly learned about the openness of the Elixir community. After hacking some first draft-like version and posting it on GitHub and Google groups—​I got a very warm and thorough code review from the language’s author José Valim! That’s just impressive and it made me even more motivated to help out the community by getting my early code into a better shape.

Coding the ActionMailer like library in a language that was born 3 years ago doesn’t sound like a few hours job—​there’s lots of functionality to be covered. An email’s body has to be somehow compiled from the template but also the email message has to be transformed to the form in which the SMTP server can digest and relay it. It’s also great if the message’s body can be encoded with „quoted printable”—​this makes even the oldest SMTP server happy. But there’s lots more: connecting with external SMTP servers, using the local in-Elixir implementation, ability to test etc… …

Liquid Galaxy for Google.org at SXSW

By Dave Jenkins
March 24, 2015

End Point enjoyed an opportunity to work with Google.org, who bought a Liquid Galaxy to show their great efforts, at last week’s SXSW conference in Austin. Google.org has a number of projects worldwide, all focused on how tech can bring about unique and inventive solutions for good. To showcase some of those projects, Google asked us to develop presentations for the Liquid Galaxy where people could fly to a given location, read a brief synopsis of the grantee organizations, and view presentations which included virtual flight animations, map overlays, and videos of the various projects.

Some of the projects included are as follows:

• Charity:Water—​The charity: water presentation included scenes featuring multi screen video of Scott Harrison (Founder/CEO) and Robert Lee (Director of Special Programs), and an animated virtual tour of charity: water well sites in Ethiopia.
• World Wildlife Fund—​The World Wildlife Fund presentation featured a virtual tour of the Bouba N’Djida National Park, Cameroon putting the viewer into the perspective of a drone patrolling the park for poachers. Additional scenes in the presentation revealed pathways of transport for illegal ivory from the …