Articles by Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

C5 Labs: Daily Ascent

There is plenty of research to show that taking stairs is one of the best ways to work out without taking time out to exercise. Taking the elevator wastes electricity, and the stairs are a great opportunity to improve overall health. With this in mind, we wanted to encourage people to start thinking about using

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Iron Gaming Launches Rezli

Our client, Iron Gaming, announced the release of Rezli today at the 2050 Events Daytona Conference. Iron Gaming is a major player in eSports tournaments, offering live streaming of gaming events that have developed a massive following in the gaming community. They came to Carbon Five looking to develop an online product that would suit

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

RethinkDB: a Qualitative Review

At Carbon Five we install and use many different database engines. Document-oriented databases are proving to be a good fit for more and more of our projects. MongoDB is the most popular of these and provides a powerful set of tools to store and query data, but it’s been plagued by performance problems when used

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Using Redis sorted sets to build a scalable real-time web waiting list.

As websocket communication makes large real-time web experiences more common, we are increasingly faced with the problem of how to build apps that work just as well with many concurrent users as they do with a few. The problem touches both the technical limits of the server infrastructure and the design of the user experience.

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Interactivity in HTML5 Canvas Visualizations

In the last canvas visualization post I discussed the canvas API’s transform functionality and how it greatly simplifies drawing complex visualizations.  In this post, I’ll talk a little about making canvas visualizations interactive and about problems you might encounter when mixing transforms and interactivity in a canvas application. Examples: (an HTML5 compatible browser is required

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Taming 2D Transforms in HTML5 Canvas

This is the second post in a series on creating custom interactive visualizations in canvas.  The first post is here. The canvas API contains five methods (rotate, scale, translate, transform, and setTransform) used to transform the drawing context. We typically use the transform API when we want to rotate or scale some element of the

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Visualizing Skillsets in HTML5 Canvas: Part 1

As Courtney chronicled in the d.build journal, Carbon Five recently engaged in a group exercise to create a physical diagram of our skills and interests.  The activity was entertaining and produced a rather attractive artifact on the wall, but we soon realized that (aside from noting that some skills were more popular than others) there

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

A 3D Flocking Simulation using HTML5 Canvas

I recently unearthed an old Java applet that I had written many years ago and decided to see what it would look like as a single page canvas application (an HTML5 compatible browser is required to view this page). The applet was inspired by the way blackbirds roost on power lines in San Francisco (and

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

A few experiments with HTML 5 applications

I’ve had a long-standing interest in taking client-side programming beyond display logic and input validation. The new HTML 5 technologies are making full-scale application development in the browser increasingly practical. Unfortunately, the needs of Carbon Five’s clients generally exceed the capabilities of purely client-side solutions, so I don’t get to spend as much time developing

Alex Cruikshank

Alex Cruikshank

Screw.Unit JS Testing in Maven: javascript-test-maven-plugin

I’ve written a maven plugin to integrate Screw.Unit javascript tests into a maven build. The project is inspired by the Blue Ridge testing framework for Rails, but it’s a bit more light-weight by design.