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Never trust software developers who don't embrace their inner geek. We're actively engaged in the pro­gram­ming world, and have plenty to say and share on the subjects that excite us. Consider this our simul­taneous soapbox, corkboard, and scrap­book for all things geeky.

Article

Posted on 02.22.11 by Brad |

From 0 to 1 Million in 6 Hours

Having an office less than a block away from a protest that’s making international headlines gave us a unique opportunity: use our technology prowess to experience live events in a new way. So what did we do? We wrote a site using Rails, WebSockets, Heroku, MongoDB, and the Twitter Streaming API. In 6 hours.

Wiunion
credit: flickr:doomyeti

The Pieces

We’re using heroku to host the site, although (with a few changes) it could be hosted as a static site on S3. The nice thing about heroku is the dead-simple deployment:

$ git push heroku

The next step was determining the persistence engine. We chose MongoDB for the flexibility to change the amount of data we store on-the-fly. Originally, we started using the ...continue reading