I was talking with a Cloudspace client the other day about engineers. He is a deeply technical individual, and his background is in the open source community. He made a very insightful comment that I wanted to share – although I’m going to let him stay anonymous unless he wants to claim credit for the comment.

A slight background: I’ve noticed that people with art... Continue reading »

I want to expand on something from a previous blog post that generated a lot of interest: “debt tickets”

Debt tickets are a way for engineers and product owners/business stakeholders to handle a common issue that comes up between the groups. Engineers love test driven development for good reason, but there’s no denying that in the short term, TDD takes longer than non-TDD. Product... Continue reading »

This post is part of an ongoing series which will attempt to demonstrate and explain the Crunchinator. Each post will describe a different part of the technology behind the Crunchinator, and hopefully each will be useful as a stand-alone tutorial.

While we might have known how we wanted to visualize data with the Crunchinator, we were not so certain on how to... Continue reading »

The other day I wrote about engineering team balance, and I want to expand on the subject a bit.

There’s a common sense idea in the tech industry that a happy engineer is a productive engineer. The important thing to remember is that (broadly speaking) with two different kinds of engineers, there are different things that keep them happy... Continue reading »

This post is part of an ongoing series which will attempt to demonstrate and explain the Crunchinator. Each post will describe a different part of the technology behind the Crunchinator, and hopefully each will be useful as a stand-alone tutorial.

One of the first things we knew about the Crunchinator is that we wanted to use D3.js. The flexibility and power of... Continue reading »

We’re big fans of split stack development. This is an architecture pattern that’s been developing for years now, but we think the new split is front-end to back-end. In fact, this is the same pattern that we used in our recently-open sourced Crunchinator. You can see the backend and frontend code on Github.

Here’s the gist: for very large applications,... Continue reading »

Today while setting up new a development envoirnment on a machine running OS X Mavericks with Xcode 5.1 (The updated Xcode allowing for iOS 7.1 development), I ran into a number of gem compilation issues. After some research it appears that an update made to clang breaks a large number of gems (yajl-ruby, puma, rmagik, json, memcached, and many more)

###The Problem

Here’s... Continue reading »