Cloud
Measuring Amazon AWS Uptime
Yesterday, for the second time in two years Techblog was offline most of the day due to an Amazon AWS service outage. That’s effectively, for business purposes, 364/365 = 99.726% uptime. 99.726 percent uptime isn’t a statistic we hear about (returns zero results on Google) because cloud hosting providers shine up the numbers the same way […]
Rapid Development with PaaS Providers
As an end-to-end hacker, I frequently need to quickly stand up a server up for quick demos, POCs, micro campaigns, or to host some services for my mobile apps. The need for a flexible, quick-to-market, pay as you go platform with tons of development choices has prompted me to explore the PaaS market, which is […]
Using Pusher to Enable the Real Time Web
At the R/GA London Make Day , the London office split into small teams to try and create, well, anything. Whilst some people were more existential, my team aimed to gamify the “Tea Round”, an important part of the London office routine. A key concept of the game was that all users would be kept in sync ‘real-time’. As with any hack day event, development […]
The Web is a Village at Scale
Some time ago, I spent a month in the Himilayas. There were no roads or cars, only footpaths connecting small villages where people lived without most modern conveniences. Inside these tight-knit mountain communities, everyone appeared to have a natural sense of each others’ well-being. In contrast, it is well documented that technical societies tend to […]
Four Developer Tips for Winning Hackathons
Recently, we participated in a 24-hour hackathon and created 2012 Matters, a Facebook app that encourages you to share what matters most in the 2012 election. People are quick to talk about the advantages of building a product quickly, but there’s much less talk about what it takes for a team to build a successful demo in a very short time. Here are four things that successful teams do to create working software in 24 hours.
Comparing Food Trucks and Software Development
Over the summer R/GA had a bout of what doctors call “Food Truck Fever”. Every day a new food truck showed up in front of our building on 39th street serving everything from Koren BBQ, homemade Chinese dumplings and artisan ice cream. Every day the trucks were greeted with a long line of hungry R/GA’ers […]
Projects supporting the Internet of Things (IoT)
The Centre for Creative Collaboration in London hosted a meetup event about Internet of Things (IoT) and here are a couple talks which I think stood out from the rest. Neul – http://www.neul.com/ These folks are basically developing hardware and infrastructure in order to connect Machine-to-Machine (M2M) by using the free TV white space spectrum. They […]
Fail Tales #1 – The Highlander Constraint – Designing for 65% Availability
In this installment of Fail Tales, we’ll take a look at the business, user experience and technology design implications of the Highlander Constraint and a few fundamental mitigation tactics. For those unfamiliar with the Highlander tale of film and television, the worlds fortune rests on one person who, by virtue of competitive mortal combat, wins […]
Build Apps Linked to Times Square!
Now, for the first time, your app can link directly to 19,000 square feet of LED screens in Times Square with one AJAX call. What makes this possible is a new API created by R/GA in collaboration with TS2 the Thomson-Reuters/NASDAQ alliance. This simple collection of methods (code named Pomegranate) enables apps to push text and images to fourteen […]
Syncing data with Mobile CouchBase
As anyone who’s used one of Amazon’s Kindle apps knows, synchronization without user interaction is a priceless feature. As any programmer who’s built an app that persists data across multiple devices knows, synchronization takes a lot of work. A todo list for accomplishing this task might look something like this: Ensure the device has connectivity […]
