Mixbook is Hiring!

Willy Franzen with his awesome site onedayonejob.com posted about our company and the two positions we are hiring:

Open Positions at Mixbook

I couldn’t have said it better myself. =)

RubyAMF Serialized Object Referencing

RubyAMF is alive and kicking…

I got possessed tonight. Freakin Karl from “Charles” (web-debugging utility) gave me his amf3 serialization code. And I was able to figure out the missing link to get object referencing working. I’ve been struggling with this for months. I’ve probably spent 50 hours of my life on this problem. I’ve looked at all the available serializing code (almost all written in JAVA), and I couldn’t figure out how to adapt it to the ultra DRY implementation we had in RubyAMF…until Karl gave me a present. It’s almost like I saw the Matrix. I now understood how ArrayCollection’s are considered externizable and thus behave like objects and arrays. My previous incorrect solutions were very close but without the guidance I got from ‘Karl from “Charles”‘ (gosh I love saying that), this would have just been another flash-in-the-pan night.

Features And Benefits:

1. The ability to re-reference arrays, hashes, and dates in the byte stream, saving RubyAMF from having to regenerate those objects and cutting down on the transfer size.
2. Transfer size for books on Mixbook have been cut down by about 20%. This is most likely because a lot of styling information is being referenced now…

I think, Dan Shultz, our Lead Flex Developer, will be happy now. He could ask for all the duplicate objects he wants as far as Im concerned. =)

It’s Late, Do You Know Where Your Migrations Are?

I’m writing this to you as we’re about to revolutionize the world with our Mixbook software. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any major changes to our site. But now, alas!, we are going to be launching the best online software to create books online. I’m not joking. This thing is really awesome. You can edit all layouts and pretty much do as you please, not to mention the backend is completely redone, which means a faster site for users.

As we speak, over 30 migrations are running on our very large database. For you Ruby on Rails people out there, you have permission to grin. =)

Our proprietary version of RubyAMF is even more powerful, yet I still keep it lean, with little code. I recently looked at the newest version and it’s completely changed. I’ve maintained RubyAMF with a different philosophy in mind, since we need it solely for Mixbook. I did add the ability to memcache the byte stream with a simple command, thats something I think can be super helpful.

Well, apparently dropping a column from a table with ~20 million rows is taking a long time. I’m going to go grab some Earl Grey, it’s going to be a long night…

RubyAMF Optimized!

Here is a link to Aaron Smith’s post about our optimizations to RubyAMF.

http://blog.rubyamf.org/?p=80

Never knew heavy metal music and coding could mix so well. =)

Check out my Mixbook!

Mixbook.com Gets Launched!

Over the last year, I’ve been developing a website which allows users to create books online. I made sure to keep everything extremely simple and easy to use. Once you create your book, you can then share it online or order a professionally printed copy.

This is great for making a vacation book with all your friends or making a collaborative gift for someone’s birthday. Let me know if you have thoughts on the product or have ideas for improvement.

Let there be…peanut butter and jelly!

The One

Tomorrow, our amazing coder from Taiwan is coming. His name is Lu, Jeremy Lu or JLu for short. Heck, call him JLizzle; he is that cool. He is our flex Neo. This is a very exciting time as our company enters the home stretch! In three weeks, the countless hours + revisions + caffeine will culminate for the world to indulge in. People will use our site to make wonderful creations. I can’t wait to see what they manifest.

Why Work in Physical Proximity

Having an integral part of your company operating from 3000 thousand miles away is not easy. By communicating your ideas clearly and being very meticulous about the product specifications, a coder can make 97% of the specified program. I feel, however, that it’s the remaining 3% that makes great programs. And thats why we needed JLu over here.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Oh, and then there is the infamous “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.” When JLu first came to work with us from Taiwan about 3 months ago, he introduced PBJT into our company culture. Many of you may be familiar with this from the Family Guy show, and its probably overplayed, but we have reinvented it based on JLu’s interpretation of it. We slow it down, we keep different form, and we add variations on the theme. If you can’t picture it, it’s ok, it was only meant to be experienced!

ROR File Uploading Using EC2, S3, and MERB!

Here little Merbie Merbie…

I can’t help to think of a cute little furry animal when I say the word Merb, but don’t be fooled. These guys may be small and perceivably harmless, but they can kick Ruby on Rails’ butt in the file uploading department.

You see, RoR has this small problem, your Mongrel instances will get p0wned while an upload is happening. So if you have three people uploading to your three mongrel website, no other page request will be served until atleast one of your mongrels get freed up again.

Enter Merb. Merb is a pocket-framework. It is a project of Ezra Zygmuntowicz and was designed to be very light-weight. Part of his goal in designing it was too solve the Rails uploading problem. Merb will allow you to do multiple file uploads on one mongrel instance. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but the Mongrel instances don’t get snatched while the user is uploading there 10 megabytes of pictures, freeing mongrel up for serving other users.