September 13th, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

In the past few months, I’ve spoken with many customers who are really excited for the new features we’re planning on releasing in the coming months, and want to partner with us to test them out before we launch them. If this sounds like something you would be interested in too, I’m working with our community team to put together a group where we can present new features for your review and feedback, and thank you for helping us out with a wide array of prizes. Let me know in the comments if you’d like an invite!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Our distribution team has released some exciting updates to our newest Gentoo stack! The new release includes Passenger 4.0.10 and Nginx 1.4.0. These are in limited access, which means that we’ve done a fair amount of internal QA, but since we always err on the side of extreme caution with major stack components, we want to continue to test them internally before we make them widely available. If you’d like to check them out, you’ll need to open a ticket with our support team! Also, any and all feedback you’d like to share with us would be greatly appreciated (we have a forum dedicated to early access releases!).

Once support has enabled the Limited Access feature Passenger 4 will appear as an application server stack when creating new environments. You may also switch existing environments to Passenger 4 by editing the application server stack and clicking ‘Apply’ on the dashboard.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Monday September 16th - Wednesday September 18th: Our lead data engineer, Ines Sombra, is on the road this week! Come chat about databases and pugs (and PUGS!) with her at Postgres Open.

Tuesday September 17th - Thursday September 19th: We’re excited to be a sponsor of TwilioCon this year! We’ll have a table in the Community Hall if you’d like to stop by and say hello.

Wednesday September 18th - Friday September 20th: Meet us in St. Louis! Our PANDA extraordinaire Edward Chiu will join fan favorite Ines for StrangeLoop.

Friday September 20th - Saturday September 21st: Time for San Francisco’s GoGaRuCo! Engine Yard is sponsoring and a ton of us are going. Hope to see you there!

Friday September 20th - Saturday September 21st: Join us for the very first Nickel City Ruby! Don’t forget to say hello to PJ for a t-shirt.

Articles of Interest The Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS), the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and technology development firm Cambridge Consultants have launched a project called Instant Wild, which uses Raspberry Pi computers to observe Kenyan national parks and protect African rhinos from poachers. Visitors to the Instant Wild site can participate by helping to observe animals that are captured by the camera and report on them to researchers. (Via the BBC)

Erika Hall suggests that startup land has gotten too comfortable with failure, and needs to start doing more research.

“Maybe knocking out a prototype or building a company is the fastest, cheapest way to learn. But often it’s not. Sure, a prototype can tell us if the user understands the potential solution — but if it’s solving a problem no one has, why bother building it in the first place?”

(via Wired)