Articles by Alon Salant
Instagram Realtime Demo with Node.js, Redis and Web Sockets
To promote and showcase the API they released in February, the folks at Instagram built and released the source for the demo app that runs http://demo.instagram.com. The app subscribes to the Instagram realtime API to be notified of new photos posted in specific geographic locations. It updates the display of the photos as they come …
Rails 3 Upgrade Tip: Invalidate Session Cookies
I recently finished working with Kathryn Aaker on upgrading Eggs, her farm CSA management software, to Rails 3. While there is a lot of good information out there on upgrading from Rails 2 to 3, we did run in to a few tricky snags not covered in the guides. One such snag happened only once …
Configure Your Gem the Rails Way with Railtie
A couple weeks ago we announced the release of the Log Weasel gem that adds useful tracing IDs to your numerous application logs. We had the configuration down to a couple simple steps but I wanted to make it even easier, possibly requiring no configuration for some environments like Rails. It turns out this is …
Log Weasel released into the wild
Log Weasel makes it easy to trace execution of a unit of work across applications and application instances by instrumenting Rails and Resque logs to show a single transaction ID for every log entry from that unit of work. These days, many of our larger Rails applications at Carbon Five are often actually a federated …
Announcing Our New Design Blog
I’m psyched to announce our new blog, d.build journal. We’ve created this blog to chronicle our adventures introducing design thinking practices to our Agile software development team. The About page explains what we’re up to: d.build journal chronicles our efforts to introduce product design practices to our team and clients. Our vision is of a …
More Features != Better Product
One of our primary motivators for wanting to play an increased role in product strategy and design with our clients is that it is too easy to find ourselves being evaluated on the rate at which we deliver product features to the detriment of the product we are building. It’s natural that our clients approach …
Play at Work for MCN in Austin, October 27
Dana Mitroff from SFMOMA and I are running a workshop October 27 at I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In, the annual Museum Computer Network conference held this year in Austin, TX. The workshop is Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Website Development. Our goal is to give attendees a taste of some of the novel …
Thanks for Celebrating 10 Years with Carbon Five
Thanks to everyone who joined us Friday night for our party at the Fort Mason Firehouse and send their well wishes in celebration our 10th year in business at Carbon Five. Thanks to James, Christian and Josh for playing great music all night long, and the for the amazing staff at BiRite for the wonderful …
Alon at Web 2.0 in SF May 5 on “Blurring the Lines”
I’m excited about our panel next Wed at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Blurring the Lines: From Human Centered Design to Customer Driven Development. We’re planning to share real world practices that help multi-disciplinary teams collaborate on creating great products. We’ve got a good range of perspective and experience to draw from. Maria Giudice …
Play at Work for Museums and the Web in Denver, April 17
Dana Mitroff from SFMOMA and I are running a session April 17 at Museums and the Web in Denver, CO called Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Web Site Development. Our goal is to give attendees a taste of some of the novel activities we use to encourage collaboration, communication and fun while …