July 26, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Soon to be world famous director and current community and developer relations manager extraordinaire, Elaine Greenberg along with videographer and editor Noelle Daley, took to Treasure Island this week to produce a Wes Anderson inspired featurette highlighting our developer conference, Distill, which we are in our final countdown towards kicking off (two weeks away). Enjoy!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

A new snapshot management feature is now GA! This allows you to set the snapshot policy at the account level and at the environment level. You may now set a default retention policy or manually delete unneeded snapshots. Our goal is to increase your visibility into how your environments are retaining snapshots, and hopefully save you money! Read more about snapshot management in our knowledge base.

We’ve also been busy preparing the release of our Windows Azure integration, so look for more information next week.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Distill, Engine Yard’s inaugural developer conference, on August 8-9 on Treasure Island in San Francisco, will feature over 25 speakers showcasing best practices from application architecture and user experience to testing and security, including Nolan Bushnell (creator of Atari and founder of Chuck E. Cheese’s), Hampton Catlin (inventor of Sass), Konstantin Haase (maintainer of Sinatra and Travis.CI), Matthew Weier O’Phinney (project lead on the Zend Framework), John Paul (lead architect at Conde Nast) and more. Distill is about education, cross-pollination and community–for you to forge new relationships with your fellow attendees and leave the event feeling enriched, edified and inspired. Tickets are currently on sale, get yours here!

Cloud Development 101, Distill’s pre-conference workshop, is on August 7 in San Francisco. Join the DevOps experts from the Engine Yard support team at the Microsoft offices in San Francisco for a free half day workshop to get you ready for deploying your applications in the cloud. This workshop is open to everyone, but space is limited.

Articles of Interest

Interested in quines? Find delight in 50 layers of deliciousness (via trivium).

Online video addicts may be interested in Chrome Cast.

If you enjoy LEDs and APIs, you might want to check out the blink(1) from ThingM. Why wouldn’t you want Twitter and your USB ports wired together?