Engine Yard Blog

Rails Girls gets girls started with tech in Buenos Aires–with help from Engine Yard

Carlos Ariel Dantiags — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:20:36 +0000

There’s no denying that code transforms technologies and societies. It’s time that girls too get excited about coding and start cracking the web. Rails Girls gives women a first experience to coding and building things.

Buenos Aires is home to many creative souls and innovative startups. Yet here too - as in all tech-savvy cities - startups and new tech ideas are mostly run by men. It’s not that we don’t like manly ideas. Quite the contrary, actually. But we’d still like to see some girls stir the game, and that’s why Rails Girls has set out on a global quest: to create local communities for women who enjoy technology and coding. We want more girls rocking the boat. And Buenos Aires is next up in the schedule.

What goes around, comes around

In its simplicity, Rails Girls is a web development workshop for women of all ages and backgrounds. It’s a fully non-profit, back-to-the-community event where the focus is on getting hands dirty with Ruby on Rails. Originating from Helsinki, Finland, events have been held across Europe and Asia, with Buenos Aires being the first (but surely not last) event in South America.

We’re thrilled to have Engine Yard on board as a sponsor for the Buenos Aires event. In fact, Rails Girls and Engine Yard go way back. Engine Yard’s Jessica Allen (@jessicaspacekat) was a keynote speaker at the Helsinki event in late 2011 where she shared her insights on Coffeescript and 80’s pop songs. Buenos Aires might miss out on the 80’s pop songs, but thanks to Engine Yard and a trusted partner from Buenos Aires, Aycron, a software development firm that provides solutions to world´s leading companies, we get to party rock to the tune of some real web development.

RoR, UI and TLC

We’re ladies equipped with hard-core, right-down-to business attitude, but still we never forget our cute, pink, sparkling selves. That’s why the workshops always include some bubbly wine, a dash of party spirit and some reserve chocolate for emergencies.

The event itself is quite cozy: some 40 women get together for two days in order to learn how to code. Each event has a handful of Rails coaches who represent the local developer community. In small groups the girls ideate a web app they want to build, and the coaches guide them through the code step by step. There are also a few lightning talks on programming, design and the web.

Now you’re thinking: “nobody learns to code in just 2 days!”. Quite right. But the idea is just to get you started. Maybe you find a fellow Rails Girl who’d like to meetup another time to continue the project. Maybe you want to start attending more tech events. Maybe you set up a local community, like the girls in Berlin [http://blog.railsgirls.com/post/21639621704/check-out-the-video-of-the-berlin-event-made-by] did. That’s the idea.

We want to light a spark.

RAILS GIRLS BUENOS AIRES IN A NUTSHELL

When: June 15th & 16th
Where: Buenos Aires, Argentina. Event held at Universidad de Palermo.
For Whom: All ladies (and men, too) who want to learn to code with RoR
Where to register: www.railsgirls.com/buenosaires
After Party: open for all, details to follow
Follow us on twitter: @RailsGirlsBA

Aycron

Website: http://www.aycron.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aycron

Mail: info@aycron.com

10 Really Awesome Computer Science Professors

Loreal Lynch — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:02:58 +0000

When it comes to coding, there are different schools of thought on self-taught vs. formally-educated. Many devs teach themselves to code when they are teenagers and as a result, feel that there’s no need to go to college. Others feel that college opens up doors and helps to reinforce skills that may be lacking.

Personally, I majored in Spanish Literature—which, I can assure you, does not come up very often in my day-to-day job here at Engine Yard. Yet despite the fact that my college coursework is not relevant to my day-to-day job function, I still feel that I learned some really awesome things in college, in large part because I had some really awesome professors.

In fact, we at Engine Yard respect and appreciate the contributions that many individuals in higher education make to our field, and we wanted to take an opportunity to recognize our picks for the top 10 computer science professors at the top 10 computer science programs.

MIT
Ken Zolot is a senior lecturer at the MIT School of Engineering. He teaches “Building Mobile Applications" and he also leads “The Founders Journey,” a class for aspiring entrepreneurs. Ken has held founding roles in several startups.

Carnegie Mellon University
Tony Wasserman is a professor of software management practice at Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley campus, and he lists open source as an area of interest. Previously, Tony was Director of Mobile Middleware Labs for HP’s Middleware division, where he worked on software infrastructure for mobile web services.

Stanford University
Alex Aiken is a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research focuses on the design of new programming languages. In particular, Alex researches new programming techniques in which it’s easier to write software that can be checked for a variety of errors.

UC Berkeley
Dan Garcia is a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering who teaches a variety of interesting undergraduate courses, among them: Macintosh Student Developers for OS X; GamesCrafters; and The Beauty and Joy of Computing.

University of Illinois—Urbana-Champagne
Sarita Adve is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Her research focus is computer architecture and she was just named a Woman of Vision Award Winner in the Innovation category for her contributions to the area of hardware and software memory consistency models.

Georgia Institute of Technology
Merrick Furst is a distinguished professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech who runs commercialization and new venture creation. He is also the director of the Flashpoint program, a “startup accelerator” that aims to equip entrepreneurs with the skills they need to get their early-stage business models off the ground.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Elliot Soloway is a professor in the College of Engineering at University of Michigan. He leads the Mobile Apps Hackathon, a 48 hour event designed to give developer students the time and environment they need in order to create apps for the Android and iOS platforms.

California Institute of Technology
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is a professor in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at CalTech. His research involves building and analyzing systems that sense and respond to changes using sensor networks, cloud computing and event-driven architecture.

University of Texas—Austin
Kathryn S. McKinley is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin. Her research includes a focus on programming languages and implementation, and developing tools that enable programmers to use a high-level programming style and modern languages while still achieving high performance on uniprocessor and multiprocessor architectures.

Cornell University
Johannes Gehrke is a professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at Cornell and a member of the Cornell Database Group, a team of researchers exploring issues related to all aspects of data management. Johannes’s research focuses on three topics: scalability in computer games and simulations; data privacy, and data mining.

Engine Yard is Teaming with Red Hat on JRuby

Bill Platt — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:40:31 +0000

With the fourth annual JRubyConf taking place this week, we’re announcing that Engine Yard is teaming with Red Hat to continue our three years of development work on JRuby.

JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby programming language, is a popular open source package that enables Ruby applications to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby allows developers to take advantage of the efficiency of Ruby while leveraging their existing investment in Java libraries and code. It provides an important bridge for enterprises who want to maintain their existing apps while taking advantage of the faster development speed that Ruby offers when building new Web apps.

During the last three years, the JRuby core team has worked at Engine Yard to develop and enhance JRuby. Engine Yard has sponsored the team as well as JRubyConf during that time. We have also built the first and only commercially-supported JRuby cloud offering with JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud.

The JRuby core team (Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo) is moving to Red Hat to continue working on JRuby, JVM languages and OpenJDK support for them. We will continue to offer JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud and our commercial support plans and professional services engagements. We’ll work closely with Charles and Tom as well as Red Hat to continue development of JRuby and collaborate on JRuby features to support customers running on JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud.

This is a great opportunity to add more resources for JRuby and continue the important work that has been accomplished, including the recent JRuby 1.7.0.preview 1 release. We look forward to working with Red Hat and continuing to collaborate with Charles and Tom on advancing JRuby.

Win a Free Ticket to php|tek for Your User Group!

Elizabeth Naramore — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:05:08 +0000

User group leaders, listen up! We have an extra Full Experience tickets to php|tek, and we'd like to give it to the community to use. php|tek happens May 22-25 in Chicago, Illinois, and is jam packed with PHP goodness, including an Unconference and a Hackathon. I mean, have you seen this schedule?! Your winner is also welcome to join us at the Engine Yard JAUNT on Friday night after the conference. There is undoubtedly much awesomeness to be had next week.

If you are interested in participating, drop me a line by Thursday, May 17 and let me know. We'll randomly select a user group to receive the ticket, and you can give it out however you wish. Thumb wrestling champion? Karaoke competition? Hackathon winner? Best high fiver? It's really up to you.

As soon as you have a winner, let me know and we'll make the arrangements with the fine folks at Blue Parabola, hosts of the conference.

Announcing Database-less environments

Ines Sombra — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:35:26 +0000

At Engine Yard, we believe that you should have the flexibility to set up your environments and manage your data stores as you see fit. This is something we take seriously as we continue to evolve Engine Yard Cloud and today, we are happy to announce database-less environments as an alpha release. If you need to utilize data offerings outside of our natively supported MySQL or PostgreSQL, then this feature will enable you to do so.

Enabling the feature

With database-less environments, it is no longer necessary to have a MySQL or PostgreSQL instance in every environment. Simply boot up a ‘No Database’ cluster with one of our Add-on database providers or roll your own using utility instances. Now it is easier and more affordable than ever to get started on Engine Yard.

You can enable this feature using the Early Access tools. Once you have the 'No db' feature enabled, you will be able to select the "No Database (Alpha)" option under Database Stack on the new environment form.

You can add as many application instances and utilities as you need, and you can stop paying for database masters that you don’t use. For example, you can follow the Mongoid RailsCast (Episode 238) and create a simple blog using Mongoid using two application instances and three utility nodes.

Add-ons and DBaaS

You can also use the ‘No Database’ feature in combination with our Add-on Program (login required). For example, you can have a simple application with just one instance and an external database. See the Database section of our Add-on Program for more information.

We hope you enjoy this feature and let us know what you think.

Notes

Removal of the database.yml file
Environments without databases will not have a database.yml file generated by Engine Yard Cloud. Enabling this feature means that you are either not using ActiveRecord or you have supplied your own database.yml file in your repository.

Infographic: A Mobile Storm in the Cloud

Loreal Lynch — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:47:28 +0000

Did you know that there are 3 billion more smartphones on earth than there are humans? Maybe that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you. But what you might find more surprising is that the growth in smartphone adoption has actually contributed to Engine Yard’s success. That’s right: as smartphone adoption has grown, so has app consumption. As a result, businesses are now prioritizing mobile application development. By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4 to 1. Innovation in mobile is imperative, and there’s a need for tools that enable businesses to innovate quickly. Many cloud computing technologies--like Engine Yard's Platform as a Service--have enabled developers and businesses to focus on application innovation.

The below infographic includes even more interesting facts about innovations in mobile, cloud computing and PaaS. Check it out and let us know where you think these fields are headed next.

Copy and paste onto your blog:

<a href="http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/platform-as-a-service/"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12384" src="http://www.engineyard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/platform-as-a-service-v2.jpg" alt="Platform as a Service" width="930" height="5572" /></a><br/>Courtesy of: <a href="http://www.engineyard.com">Engine Yard</a>

Exciting New Integration: Badgeville in our Helpdesk!

Jamie Bleichner — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:17:11 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we have integrated Badgeville’s gamification technology into our Zendesk ticketing system. As you use the helpdesk to perform different actions, (searching documentation, contributing to forums, completing satisfaction surveys, etc.) you will be able to earn many different badges and complete many different missions.

Through this integration we hope to increase community engagement, and to not only give you new channels to share your experiences and ideas, but also to reward you for it!

While inside our helpdesk, if you hover over a user’s picture, a little summary profile will appear showing how many points and rewards that user has, as well as the last badge that they have earned.

By clicking on “Click for profile” you will be brought to the user’s showcase that shows their progress on the current missions, with hints on how to earn the badges associated with them. You will also be able to see your showcase anytime, by clicking on the “Profile” link in the upper right corner.

Also, there have been a few new Community forums opened up in the last week, so if you want to share your ideas and start earning some badges, check them out here!

Keep your eyes open. We will be introducing additional missions in the future. If you have any questions or feedback, please open a ticket and I will get back to you!

Happy playing!

Engine Yard Expands IaaS Offerings with HP Cloud Services

Bill Platt — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:01:04 +0000

We’re excited to announce that we’re expanding the infrastructure options available to our customers with support for HP Cloud Services. We empower developers by providing a rock-solid platform with choices of infrastructure and components that make their job of building great applications as easy as possible. Engine Yard is one of the first PaaS providers to add support for HP’s public cloud, which is based on their world-class hardware and software, using key elements of the HP Converged Infrastructure combined with OpenStack technology.

For the past six years, our customers have relied on the Engine Yard platform to enable them to innovate faster, with higher reliability and while maintaining control of their environment. We continue to invest deeply in our open source PaaS to provide value for our customers. We want to ensure developers can rapidly build and iterate their applications while using Engine Yard Cloud to provide the on-demand scalability and reliability they need as their businesses grow and succeed.

By combining our leading commercial-grade open PaaS with HP's public cloud infrastructure offerings, we’re providing development teams a powerful new solution to rapidly deploy both large and small applications in the cloud. Engine Yard has deep roots in open source, and we continue to champion open computing by adding new IaaS options like HP’s public cloud.

We’ll be announcing more details about availability. To get updates, click here.

All About High Availability

Sal Cardello — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:22:15 +0000

What is a High Availability system? There are multiple opinions/definitions of high availability. Some people refer to it as Disaster Recovery; I refer to it as an implementation to ensure that business systems spend minimal time down from a disaster.

For the purpose of this post, I think we should establish a description of Disaster Recovery and how it relates to High Availability. Disaster recovery includes the processes, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. There are 7 tiers to disaster recovery; tier 0 is no data loss prevention or basically several single points of failure, while tier 8, which is a fully automated failover system with zero to minimal data loss. Tier 7 and 8 are more in the classification of High Availability. Recognizing that there are plenty of discussions, opinions, and confusion regarding High Availability/Disaster Recovery, I have decided to discuss what I believe is the most logical solution for e-commerce and mission critical cloud applications.

Utilizing cloud technology for applications has grown immensely over the past 3 years. This growth is due to the fact that IT organization (or lack there of) has minimal responsibility, overhead and maintenance. All of this equates to less money spent and larger margins on revenues.

Although this has its upsides, there are many pitfalls associated as well. Some of these are lack of control over infrastructure, lack of knowledge as to what infrastructure is to be utilized and a lack of knowledge about the maintenance of this infrastructure. It is important to remember that cloud infrastructure is subject to outages just as normal infrastructure would be. A virtualized environment is a great way to minimize costs and maximize margins, but it does not prevent against outages. To minimize the lack of control clients have over these systems it is recommended that one invest into an insurance policy that would minimize down time during a man made or natural disaster.

The most logical or practical insurance plan to ensure ones business stays up with minimal down time is to implement a geo redundant High Availability system. A geo redundant system is basically a master/slave system located in two separate geographical locations. This is very similar to what most everyone implements with their local databases, in the event of the master database failing the slave takes over to where the application has minimal to no data loss with minimal application downtime.

Accurately implementing requires that the database replication is constant, in our agile world we also need to ensure that all code is pushed to both locations, the directory structures are replicated at a specific intervals and that all of the policies and procedures are in place to fail over from one geo location to the other geo location with minimal downtime and maximized efficiency. With the lack of control in cloud computing and the definite knowledge that an outage will occur, the logical solution to ensure Application up time and minimal Data loss is to implement a Geo-Redundant High Availability system.

We at Engine Yard recognize the need that clients have in running their applications on the cloud and that downtime equate to loss of revenue and more importantly possible loss of client. We have now implemented this technology and are offering it to clients that need that solid insurance.

Check out Engine Yard Professional Services page to learn more. If you have any questions about services offered for the Engine Yard PaaS, please feel free to contact proservices@engineyard.com.

Introducing Bloggy: A simple way to add a Jekyll blog to any Rails application

Zach Bruhnke — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:22:18 +0000

One of the most popular tools our customers use to help drive traffic to their site is a company blog. Blogs that are informative and helpful will attract your target audience and bring attention to your website, and more importantly, your work.

Here at Engine Yard, we have found that some of our best sources of traffic are the blog posts written by our team that help educate customers on our product.

In particular, there is one blogging platform that has really started to catch on with the hacker community and especially those of us who love Ruby.

Authored by Tom Preston-Warner, Jekyll is an open-source blog-aware static site generator. Unlike Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger and the like, it allows users to write posts in the editor of their choice with the markup they prefer and then commit the posts to git. I use Markdown to write my posts, but many others choose to write their posts in HTML because they were coming from WordPress and it felt more at home.

Currently, there are lots of posts out there detailing how to get started with Jekyll, how to run Jekyll as a Rack application, etc. What I want to talk about is just a little bit different from these posts.

Let's start with a simple concept. For SEO purposes it is better if your blog runs at http://mydomain.com/blog rather than http://blog.mydomain.com. We can go into detail here later but that's really for an entirely different post. Again there are numerous ways of accomplishing this task but I want to talk about doing it with Jekyll.

Finding a way to run your blogging platform within your existing application without many changes to the server configuration is a common cost cutting technique for bootstrapping startups, well-funded companies and even public corporations. One thing we know first hand is how time consuming and difficult that has proven to be for many of you over the years.

That’s why I wrote Bloggy. Simply put, Bloggy makes it easy to run a Jekyll blog right within your existing Rails application with no changes to your current configuration on Engine Yard.

Installing and configuring the Bloggy gem

Start by adding

gem ‘bloggy’

to your Gemfile in your repo, then just run

$ bundle

and it should be ready to go for you. Alternatively, you could install it by running

$ gem install bloggy

Once Bloggy is installed, all you need to do to get a working blog up and running is to use the provided Rails generator.

$ rails g jekyll:blog blog

BAM! This just generated your new blog and it’s live at http://yourdomain.com/blog

Go ahead start up your Rails server and check it out.

What Just Happened?

The static HTML generated by Jekyll (the magic behind Bloggy) goes to your public/blog directory, but the rest of the files live at config/jekyll and this is where you will create new posts, change the default look and feel of your blog and make any configuration changes you desire as you get acquainted with Jekyll.

If you’ve never used Jekyll before, you need to familiarize yourself with a few things.

1. Bloggy Generates static HTML from the markdown files that live inside the config/jekyll/_posts directory, so this is where you will create new posts (more on how to make the generation happen later).

2. The default layout of the Bloggy generated blog is found at config/jekyll/_layouts/default.html. This file is plain ole HTML and can be edited to your liking just like you would edit any other HTML file.

3. The config/jekyll/css directory contains, wait for it … your CSS files!

Configuration and new posts

If however, you are familiar with Jekyll already you will be delighted to know you can still choose from all of the options you enjoyed with the Jekyll gem previously.

The same familiar config elements of Jekyll can be accessed using the _config.yml file that is now neatly tucked away in the config/jekyll directory of your Rails application.

Now that your new blog is installed and serving pages at http://yourdomain.com/blog you probably are thinking:

“Zach this is great, but how do I write a new blog post? How do I get rid of the test post you provided me?”

Those are great questions. I’ll start with the simplest:

1. To get rid of the generated test post, simply delete the file from your config/jekyll/_posts.

$ rm appname/config/jekyll/_posts/2012-04-25-a-test-post.markdown

2. And to create a new post it’s not much more complicated. Just run the Rake task provided with Bloggy, which will automatically generate a post and open it so you can start writing right away.

$ rake np your_post_title

This will by default open up your new post in TextMate. If you don’t have TextMate or prefer another editor you can just change mate on this line at the end of the new_post.rake file located in your appname/lib/tasks directory.

‘mate #{path}’ - for example if you wanted to use vim you should use ‘vim #{path}’

Now, if you’re looking carefully at the created post you will notice that your post was named with a slightly different scheme than just your title. This is critical to Jekyll being able to recognize and generate your posts into static HTML files that your application can serve, so please do not change this. For example if you ran that task today your post would look something like this:

2012-05-03-your-post-title.markdown

Feel free to change the date just make sure you leave it in the correct format, but keep in mind that YAML is required at the top of your post (including the dashes) for Jekyll to generate Metadata when generating the final HTML that you will see your posts rendered in. So the top of your file should always look something like this:

---
layout: post
published: false
title: A Test Post
---

The Rake task provided takes care of that for you but be sure to edit your title and add any other metadata you want included. Other than that, just be sure to change published: false to published: true so Jekyll knows your post is ready to go live on your blog for the world to see. Once you have written, edited and reviewed to your liking all you need to do is another Rake task.

$ rake generate

From there Jekyll will automatically regenerate your posts as static HTML files stored in the public/blog directory and these files will be served from http://yourdomain.com/blog with no additonal Nginx configuration.

You will have to hit CTRL + C on your keyboard after the files are generated to stop the Jekyll server as it wants to stay on and continually look for new posts to generate.

Now from your application directory you can just run a few commands to make sure you have added your changes to git and pushed them to your repo.

$ git add .

$ git commit -m ‘your commit message’

$ git push

Then deploy to Engine Yard using our awesome CLI tool! by running

$ ey deploy

That’s it! It’s really that simple.

So go check out Bloggy and be sure to fork and contribute if you want to see something added to Bloggy that would help you even more!

I have a sample application for you guys to play around with at our Engine Yard GitHub account.

Alternatively, you can just checking it out in action by clicking here.

Happy blogging!