April 5, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Welcome to our first “This Week at Engine Yard” update! This is where we plan to keep you apprised of the weekly events, engineering work, and various interesting articles that we host/push/read every week.

Let me know what you think, and if there’s anything else you’d like to see highlighted!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Our new Gentoo distribution has been released into early access. We’ve tested our latest distribution against many typical use cases but we would love you to try out your applications on this stack and send us any feedback.

Check out what new features we have in Early Access and Limited Access (aka behind a feature flag). Highlights include: Chef 10, Gentoo 12.11, Riak Clusters, ELBs, and many others. We love customer feedback on these features, so please let us know what you think in our early access feedback forum!

Data Data Data

Postgres had a big security update released; we immediately posted an update and strongly recommend that you upgrade! We had a customer set up the first node.js + Riak environment we’ve had on Engine Yard’s Cloud product! We are thrilled to see customers using this in its early access phase and looking forward to continuing to improve Riak as a product as we move towards making it GA.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!) Distill Conference’s CFP is closing in a few days! Send in a CFP if you have something to share and enjoy San Francisco’s Indian Summer, developing, fun, and/or whiskey.

In other Distill news, we just announced that Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, will be a keynote speaker!

Coming up next week: Engine Yard’s own Eamon Leonard will be giving the keynote at Whisky Web II at Airth Castle in Scotland.

We’re sponsoring the awesomely fun LessConf.

The always charming Long Nguyen from our Buffalo, New York office will be presenting at WNY Ruby Brigade’s Tuesday meetup on “Lessons Learned from Rock Climbing.”

Our Dublin office will be actively populating Thursday’s PubStandards, as well as hosting Tuesday’s Dublin Riak! meetup. Our tech writer Keri Meredith will be attending Basho’s Write the Docs conference in Portland.

This week:

Engine Yard sponsored Mountain West Ruby Conf, where platform engineer Shai Rosenfeld presented “Testing HTTP APIs with Ruby.”

For those who prefer beach to mountain time, platform engineer Jacob Burkhart presented at Ancient City Ruby with a cautionary tale of “How to Fail at Background Jobs.”

Rounding out what can only be described as a super busy conference week, application engineer PJ Hagerty presented on “Ruby Groups: Think Locally - Act Globally,” capitalizing upon his own experiences growing the WNY Ruby Brigade at Ruby Midwest.

Our Portland office hosted the PDX Women Who Hack and an initial planning meeting for a Portland branch of CoderDojo.

Our Dublin office hosted Ireland’s inaugural PostgreSQL user group (check out the meetup!), and the DevOps Ireland Dublin Monitoring Meetup.

Articles of Interest We’re increasing our support of Open Source and Rubinius and welcoming Dirkjan Bussink as we sponsor him to work on that project full time!

Jake Luer wrote a comprehensive blog all about how to deliver iOS push notifications using node.js.