April 12, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Have you remembered to do your taxes? Here’s what we’ve been up to this week!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

The engineyard gem got a couple bumps this week by maintainer and platform engineer extraordinaire Martin Emde.

The dashboard UI is being updated to prepare to allow customers to select multiple languages when creating a new app. Application configuration options are also now changing based on language selection. Engine Yard recommends different application server stacks, for example, if you’re running Node.js. Read all about it and some other enhancements in our release notes! Bug hunting: After observing some issues with booting servers in AWS US-East-1, platform engineer and crowd favorite Josh Lane realized that AWS has subtly changed address attach behavior, and DNS name changing is now more eventually “eventually consistent.” Updates to our code was made to handle this change. We’ve also added more diagnostic checks to catch similar changes more quickly in the future.

Rails 4.0 is in early access! Let us know what you think in the early access feature feedback forum.

Data Data Data

Lead data engineer Ines Sombra is working on her Ricon East presentation, and we hope to see you there in New York! Ping us if you’d like a Friends of Engine Yard discount code. :)

Work continues on our early access Riak on Cloud offering as we move towards the GA launch.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

The CFP for the Distill Conference closed. Thank you all so much for your submissions! Our reviewers are checking them out and making some tough calls with such a great response. Don’t forget to give your song requests to application support engineer PJ Hagerty.

Tuesday, April 16th: Enjoy beer, pizza, and php at our Dublin office! Talks will cover adding realtime features to PHP apps with Redis, Node and Socket.io by Clay Smith; John Needham will discuss how he worked to scale TheJournal.ie; and our own Ross Duggan will dive into the intricacies of Version controlling your infrastructure.

Wednesday, April 17th: The one and only PJ Hagerty is continuing his world tour, taking “Ruby Groups: Act Locally - Think Globally” to Rhode Island’s Ruby Group!

Thursday, April 18th: Open Data Ireland, exploring “Commercial Exploitation of Open Data for Private Gains,” will be meeting at our Dublin office. Coming up next week

Ticketing maintenance: Saturday, April 13th from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM(Pacific Time); if you have any issues contacting us via our ticketing system, please call us at 1-866-518-9273 or contact us via IRC (#engineyard channel on irc.freenode.net – web client: http://webchat.freenode.net/). More info

Articles of Interest

Platform engineer and surfer supreme Jacob Burkhart returns from his Ancient Ruby exploits and shares “What happened to the Rails 4 Queue API?” on our blog.

Application support engineer and php enthusiast Davey Shafik takes on learning Ruby on Rails for a Distill project and shares his lessons and revelations along the way.

The New Yorker reports that Windows 8 has crashed the North Korean missile control computers, and Kim Jong-Un may be declaring war on Microsoft, leading to a complex array of emotional responses around the office.