Mint Digital

Last week saw the first London Redis meetup, which we were proud to host over at Mint Towers.

We've just got word over at Mint Towers that recently launched project landshare has just received a nomination.

Landshare has been nominated in the Food & Garden category of the Sustained Magazine Dandelion award.

Go Landshare!

Recently Noam blogged about a new project that we're working on called Landshare. It went live late last week and already we're seeing some great results.

We were overjoyed to see this comment on the blog:

"SUCCESS! in response to a request for land I was contacted by a Landowner over the weekend. We met today and I now have access to as much land as I could ever have wished for. I wish all other Landshare users good luck in the search for suitable partners as this is a fantastic project"

This is exactly what we were hoping for when we started on Landshare. It's great to see it actually happening in real life.

Here's the presentation that we were going to give at Mashup last Thursday... before we realised we only had 60 seconds and weren't allowed slides.

Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it's always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.

What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk, on Saturday was particularly interesting. I've been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.

Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It's great to see someone else talk about ideas we've been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.

We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn't aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!

Anyway, a great conference all round and I'll be back next year (if it's on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.

Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high-performance rails apps. I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.

Just back from RailsConf Europe. These were my three top moments:

1. Jason Hoffman's session on scaling was really superb. Over the last few months we've had to deal with scaling a Rails app urgently. Jason had sound advice and interesting perspectives.

The headline is scaling isn't a Rails problem but a network and hardware issue. Interesting things Jason suggested:

• Use multiple asset hosts to get more connections to the browser (e.g. most browsers will open only 2 connections per host, if you set up media1, 2, 3 and 4 for assets even if they all point to the same box, the browser will open up to 8 connections.
• Use DNS in a major way.
• Make separate apps for each controller and keep them on their own boxes/processes. This may sound strange, but Jason said most apps could have the following DNS (either on the same box or different ones):
  • Dynamic (domain.com)
  • Static (assets1-4, 5-8)
  • Uploads (break into separate app)
  • Downloads (unauthenticated to static servers, sixty secs urls for authenticated)
  • Admin

2. Evan Phoenix spoke well on Rubinius the new Ruby virtual machine. It was a really fun talk with some carefully made up graphs and stats. The bottom line is that it is much faster, takes less memory and is much easier to fix bugs or extend as most is written in Ruby.

3. For me, the real highlights were the events surrounding the conference. Both Bratwurst on Rails on the Sunday and Reject Conf on Tuesday night were great places to meet with loads of interesting people, including the guys from SoundCloud and my fellow countrymen from Scotland on Rails.