Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Two really cool events are going down in the next couple of weeks here in Baltimore that everyone should check out.
Ignite Baltimore is an event I'm helping to organize where 16 people each get five minutes on stage to talk about something they are passionate about. We've got hackers, bloggers, painters, reverends, entrepreneurs, green builders, and so on all coming together to share what they know. The event debuts Thursday, October 16th at 6 pm at The Windup Space (12 W. North Ave).
The second
SocialDevCampEast conference, taking place on November 1st, is a great gathering of the smartest tech innovators on the East coast. As
Dave Troy writes:
SocialDevCamp is a real user-powered unconference with no commercial agenda -- the entire purpose is to CONNECT the leaders who will shape the next wave of tech innovation on the east coast. Come see how dynamic a truly user-powered conference can be!
I'm really interested in these events because they are a great way to connect with others interested in technology and digital culture, and learn new things while I'm doing it. See you there!
Labels: conferences, Ignite, SocialDevCampEast
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I will be speaking at the
Lone Star Ruby Conference in September about how we use Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the
Amazon Web Services virtual cloud. Below is a summary of what I'll be talking about.
In OtherInbox, almost every system administration task imaginable is carried out using Ruby, meaning we as developers can enjoy all of Ruby's expressive benefits and spend less time scripting the shell, writing cron tasks, or using other languages. Because we make fewer context switches from thinking in Ruby to thinking in other languages, we also reap a big productivity benefit.
Using Ruby throughout our cloud also means that porting the application to run in different production environments is a trivial task, because Ruby is the glue connecting the Ruby components together, thus all we require is a Ruby interpreter to deploy.
Two key Ruby technologies have matured in the previous 18 months which make it ideal for almost every layer of managing a cluster of servers:
- god.rb allows fine-grained process monitoring and daemon control (a la monit)
- rufus-scheduler enables Ruby-based scheduling (replacing cron, and providing a great facility for running daemons that must be executed on a recurring basis)
When combined with these Ruby workhorses, developers today can spend much more of their time writing Ruby code, and less time struggling with the vagaries of their production environment:
The talk will also include a discussion of using several different
AWS gems to make
cloud computing simple, by illustrating the use of Amazon's
S3 and
SQS services to distribute asychnronous work and handle communication between servers.
Labels: conferences, deployment, god.rb, lone star ruby conference, otherinbox, ruby
