Let’s put it out there right away – Deployments can be tough. When you’re small, it might be fine to Secure Copy (SCP) your code to the server, create a symbolic link (symlink) to the configuration file and restart Apache HTTP Server. Bam, done! But what happens when your business starts to grow? The whole…
As part of the development of the next generation of Chaordix products, we’ve been experimenting with different technologies that could prove useful to our development process. While I’m normally not a fan of database ORMs (Object Relational Mappers), one in particular has captured my attention. The unfortunately-named Peewee ORM is a very lightweight ORM written…
Building an app without an architecture is like assembling a house without a plan; yeah it might stand up at first, but when the wind changes direction and the rain starts pouring, then you’re going to be plugging up a lot of holes. The Throne of JS conference that took place in Toronto a few…
When city planners get together over beers and pretzels at their local pub and discuss how to make their city seem strong to residents and attractive to visitors, they invariably decide to build something really tall. The higher in the sky it pokes, the better. After all, the taller things are, the further away they…
As the longest-serving employee of Chaordix (I joined in January 2007), I’ve seen a lot of changes over the past 5+ years. The Chaordix model came out of the (crowdsourcing pioneer) Cambrian House “test lab”, originally founded on the emerging idea of crowdsourcing. Back in late 2006, a Cambrian House website was built that allowed…
In modern web applications, performance and scalability are key to success. When dealing with large amounts of dynamic data, your relational database can quickly become a performance bottleneck. There are methodologies to mitigate the bottleneck, but they usually deal with database sharding and replication which can be rather cumbersome. A better method is to use…
Getting and keeping a team working effectively within a consistent development environment is nothing to sneeze at. A modern application stack needs databases, caches, message queues, servers, interpreters, libraries… I mean, who has the time to be constantly keeping systems up-to-date with rapidly-moving, parallel codebases? Who enjoys mucking about in dependency hell? Who likes hearing…
We’re all familiar with the LAMP stack – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Perl or Python). What follows is my fakedramatized diary showing the transition in thinking between LAMP and LERMP (Linux, nginx, Redis, MySQL and Python), an acronym far more difficult to pronounce antiunintelligibly. 12/04/16 Dear Diary, Today I learned about Python, and it…
I fought for it tooth and nail, but ultimately failed to acquire approval to blow something up for this blog post. Thanks for nothing Chaordix. Keep your heads up and watch out for an unsanctioned minor explosion. There’s something about a primarily visual medium (such as web or print design) that invites high levels of…
Here at Chaordix, our “cloud” experiences go way back to the early days of Amazon AWS. In the beginning (circa 2006), we had a few hosted servers at Rackspace. Later Amazon announced EC2, their first “cloud” servers. We flirted a little by installing one of our sites on an EC2 instance to see how it…