Head of PLG and Developer Relations at Hookdeck
In part 1 of this 3-part write-up from my talk at FOWA London 2013 I covered the History, Background, Benefits & Use Cases of Realtime. In this 2nd part I'm going to provide details on some fundaments about realtime web technology and an overview of the basic types of functionality that they offer.
This is part 1 of a 3 part series on Choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack. It's based on the talk I recently gave at the Future of Web Apps.
I quite frequently see posts on StackOverflow about how to add realtime functionality to a PHP application, or to build a realtime solution with PHP. And I'm increasingly getting emails asking the same. So, here's what I feel the current state of Realtime Web Technology is for PHP.
On Monday we published our first BladeRunnerJS (BRJS) blog post. It provides an overview of what BRJS is, why it was created and why it's being open sourced. We saw a nice spike in traffic and I was thinking about ways I could try to sustain that. I decided not to take any action (e.g. submit for consideration in JavaScript Weekly) for two reasons; we'd publish plenty more posts over the coming weeks and we don't have any source in github right now. It would therefore be much better to focus on getting traffic when there's actually a solution that people can download and try out.
Over the past three weeks I've had the opportunity to investigate modern web development tools and I feel a little bit like a kid in a sweet shop. Firstly, I'm excited to be here. Secondly, there's so much to choose from. In the past you may have been able to pick up a selection box containing a few pre-defined dev tool options. Now, there are so many technologies and tools available it's like being in the pic 'n' mix section.
Around 3 months ago I made the very difficult decision to leave Pusher. After just over 2 years I'm leaving behind what - up until now - has been the best job I've ever had. In this post I'll cover what's been achieved while I've been at Pusher, why I left and what I'm going to be doing next.
I've been to quite a few conferences over the last couple of years (46 conferences and events, by my count). Converge Conference was something different. Although a tech conference, the focus in the talks I saw was most definitely on soft skills and experiences, and not really on the tech. This was highly refreshing. There were 3 talks in particular that resonated with me.
Inspired by the first two talks at #stacked13 by Mike Taulty and then Maarten Balliauw I thought I'd jump straight into Windows Azure Mobile Services and build an a realtime collaborative synchronised todo list. I'd do this based on the Get started with data in Mobile Services HTML guide. I would then and host it on a Windows Azure web site.
First I'd like to emphasise that this is a blog post on how and not why. The why comes down to the judges. So, thanks Judges! Secondly I'd like to thank Rob Dunfey for the idea and for providing additional motivation - I'll dig deeper into this later. Finally: what am I going to cover? As the title suggests, I want to cover the how.
For a long while now I've not been getting as much out of Twitter as I used to. There's too much information to take in. I've long said that Twitter is throw-away. If you miss something then it doesn't matter. If it's important then I'll see a retweet or pick up the information from somewhere else. This is wrong. Just because it's not being retweeted by everybody it doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile update. Just because it doesn't get upvoted on Hacker News it doesn't mean that it's not relevant to me.
