June 21, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

We’ve been very busy on a number of exciting projects that we’re looking forward to sharing with you all. While I can’t tell you what they are just yet, I can point you to some adorable animal photos.

Have an awesome weekend!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

PHP customers will be excited to know we’ve released Composer support! Composer is a dependency manager for PHP and allows developers to specify project dependencies in a composer.json file - Composer then handles the rest. Big props to the legendary Ben Chapman for his work getting this ready – read all about it in our docs!

We’ve released a feature to improve snapshot management for our customers into Early Access. This feature allows you to see snapshots attached to your environments and delete them. You can also set a default policy for how long you want to keep snapshots around via the UI. Our default limit is now 90 days, if you enable the feature, so if you had a stopped environment with some super old snapshots in it, talk to support before you enable it. Hopefully this will make snapshot management significantly more easy and transparent!

Data Data Data

This week Ines and team worked on some deep diving projects dealing with how backups will be performed on new relational clusters going forward. This super forward focused work will eventually begin to reveal itself as we reveal new cluster types, enhancements, and a few new features.

Also, for the Postgres fans out there, Tom Lane’s excellent SF-PUG presentation on The Architecture of the PostgreSQL query planner is up!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Tuesday June 25th, 6:30pm: San Francisco Office: Let’s meet up and talk about LevelDB and Node! Speakers this week include Dominic Tarr, Rod Vagg, Jake Verbaten, Paolo Fragomeni, and Mikeal Rogers.

Tuesday June 25th, 6:30pm: Buffalo Office: Girl Develop It! is teaching an Intro to HTML & CSS course, the third in a series of four.

Wednesday June 26th, 6:30pm: Portland Office: We will be hosting Coder Dojo for students K-12 to learn about software. Parents welcome to attend and participate!

NodeConf (June 27-29, Walker Creek Ranch, CA). We’re sponsoring - if you see Engine Yard t-shirts, come by and say hello! We’re excited to be sponsoring NodeConf for the first time, summer camp style.

Thursday June 27th, 6:30pm: Dublin, Ireland Office: Node.js Dublin will be investigating all things Node. Grab a ticket here!

EuRuKo (June 29-30, Athens, Greece). Stop by the Engine Yard booth! Grab a t-shirt and some swag, learn what’s new with Cloud and meet our awesome community manager, Kelsey Schimmelman.

Lonestar PHP (June 29-30, Dallas, TX). We’re excited to be returning to Lonestar PHP–if you see Davey Shafik walking around, say hi!

Articles of Interest

Google finally admits that those crazy brain teasers do not, in fact, indicate anything about how good a hire an engineer is going to be. But they’re definitely fun to dream up.