Everyone wants things to look good. Apple taught the tech industry about the value of design, and that you can charge a substantial premium for it. There are even studies that suggest that products can be made more usable simply by looking better, regardless of the actual ease-of-use, since people will spend more time exploring something that looks good.

The thing with analytics platforms is... Continue reading »

Yesterday was Tech Talk Thursday and our stupid-talented Graphic Designer, Keegan Berry, brought some intense HTML5 knowledge. He covered a pretty wide-range of HTML5 topics, including some sweet background info about W3C and WHATWG that illuminated how HTML5 developed to it's current point, but focused mostly on the current state of HTML5 and some fun new semantic developments.

Want a peek at Keegan's baller-ass training?... Continue reading »

To coincide with Cloudspace's release of Rubberband Flamethrower, a benchmarking tool for ElasticSearch, here's some more helpful info if you're planning on building search into your app.

ElasticSearch is in the Lucene family, the same as Solr, but the two have different uses. If you're working on a small app that needs to search less than a million documents and the database isn't updated... Continue reading »

Coupling is the extent to which any component of your software depends on other components.  When software starts to mature, the coupling decisions neglected early on in development can come back with a vengeance and severely slow down what should be a very simple update.  Making all aspects of your code as independent as possible will go a long way in keeping technical debt to... Continue reading »

Congratulations to our friends over at Mashery: Scott Rafer, Kirsten Spoljaric, Oren Michels, and all the rest of the team. They're the world's best API management company, with clients like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Intel. Their customers love them so much that this week, Intel actually decided to purchase the whole company! We've been friends with them ever since 2006 when they started operating,... Continue reading »

Rubberband Flamethrower is a rubygem for benchmarking data insertion on Elastic Search servers that I'm proud to release into the open source wilds. If you want to mess around with big data, Elastic Search is definitely a cool tool to play... Continue reading »

This is the first in a set of blog posts about how we use Git and Capistrano in our project workflow at Cloudspace. Everyone can agree that using source control and automated deployment are important for any web project. We work in small teams within Cloudspace or alongside our clients' engineers, so it's even more important to have a consistent strategy for maintaining branches and... Continue reading »