March 28, 2014: This Week at Engine Yard

Out of sheer, unapologetic envy for the meetup in NYC, “Papers we love,” our lead data engineer Ines Sombra started a “Papers we love too!” meetup in San Francisco. Our inaugural meetup was Wednesday evening, and the NYC organizers joined us for an excellent presentation on “Dapper, a Large Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure,” a much loved paper chosen and presented by Yammer infrastructure engineers Ryan Kennedy and Anjali Shenoy.

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

MySQL has been tweaked to load time zone tables by default, per customer requests in our feature request forums. Is there something you’d love to have Engine Yard add to our platform? Ask us there, and it could just happen!

We’ve done most of the work necessary to release AWS M3s, and are continuing to improve our integration with C3s. Expect more in this space shortly!

A bunch of other updates are chronicled in our regular release notes!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

RubyConf Philippines, March 28-29: Attendees can visit the Engine Yard table to meet members of our support team who can answer a wide range of any technical and non-technical questions you may have about Engine Yard. Also, PJ Hagerty continues his fabulous world tour, and will be giving a talk on creating active user groups in your local Ruby community.

Great Wide Open, April 2-3, Atlanta, Georgia: Engine Yard’s lead data engineer, the one and only Ines Sombra, will be doing a two hour workshop covering Databases in the Cloud (first half relational, second half non-relational). A few of us will also be tagging along so be sure to stop by our table!

Interaction 14 Redux, April 3, Dublin, Ireland: Engine Yard will be hosting Dublin’s Interaction 14 Redux, with a series of four lightning talks covering highlights and themes from the conference as well as three brand new presentations from our Irish speakers who submitted their talks for the Interaction 14.

Ancient City Ruby, April 3-4, St. Augustine, Florida: Our most excellent deployment engineer, Evan Machnic, presents on how he juggles children and rubies without missing a beat – or dropping anyone.

Articles of Interest

Blogger highscalability examines the Facebook/Occulus acquisition and suggests that Occulus made this deal for a very sensible reason: they need help scaling, in a big way, to launch VR.