Big Bang Technology

Big Bang Blog

Programming

An experiment in Geolocation

I’ve been experimenting with web-based Geolocation technologies in a small proof of concept Rails application. The application itself is pretty vanilla: I wanted to build something that shows me where I am right now, and where some determined locations are at a fixed position. The idea being that I could see how far away I am from my favourite donut shops. Read more...

An Introduction to Web Sockets

Last night at Toronto's HTML5 Meetup, Cameron was given the opportunity to speak to about 40 members of Toronto's developer community about Web Sockets. Not only did he talk about the technical implications of the new protocol, he raised interesting questions about the design opportunities that will emerge as Web Sockets become more widely adopted. If you weren't able to make it, we hope you enjoy watching the presentation here. Read more...

What to do when your DNS fails

On the morning of April 19th, our phones started ringing, and our email clients started filling up quick. Our software, Woople, was suddenly inaccessible to a large majority of our users. My initial reaction was that the application servers had come crashing down. Woople’s usage has been growing fairly quickly in the past couple weeks. New Relic RPM showed us lower than normal usage, but our cluster was still responding as expected.

Rails 3 upgrade - A Retrospective

UPDATED: October 11th, 2010 Now with more working code!

August 29th, 2010 was a glorious day for Rails developers around the globe, not only because it is my birthday, but also because Rails 3.0 was officially released. I would like to send congratulations and thanks to all 1600 contributors that helped make this release a reality.

I’ve spent the better part of September upgrading our main application to Rails 3. My hopes are that you will read this and gain some insight as what to expect when upgrading your own application.