If you need a database feature, Postgres probably has it.
Recently, in versions 9.3 and 9.4, the Postgres devs have added JSON support in the form of JSON types, functions, and operators.
JSON functionality ends up being pretty handy for REST APIs, which I will get into in a later post, but it also has some other uses.
You may not have known this, but Postgres has Publish-Subscribe functionality in the form of NOTIFY, LISTEN, UNLISTEN. This is commonly used for sending notifications that table rows have changed.
Software should solve real-world human problems, and the most important problems will probably be the hardest.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when developers come face to face with people who depend on a software app for their lives.
I am currently attending the ISC Project's Global Workshop, which brings together technologists and activists from all over the world. Most of the attendees are activists from different communities across the globe fighting for human rights, political freedom, and independent media. All of them use technology to advance their work, but the choice of which tool to use requires vastly different criteria than societally privileged people typically consider.
Most of us answer "Which tool should I use?" based on some pretty simple criteria:
In three weeks, the &yet training team is excited to lead Fluent Conf 2015 attendees in three training sessions covering subjects like Native Web Application development, Node.js security, and WebRTC. One of our latest training offerings is Building Native Web Applications, led by Henrik Joreteg and Luke Karrys.
Henrik, prolific module creator, is a foremost developer tackling the subject of Native Web Applications (aka Single Page Apps) in the JavaScript community. He has pioneered many techniques for building stateful JavaScript applications, especially those with a realtime aspect.
User experience is very important to us. Almost a year ago, Chrome changed the way screensharing works in WebRTC in a way that increased the usage for Talky by 300%. Still, the onboarding process for your first screen share was not as nice as it could have been.
It used to be, if you tried to share your screen, you were required to install an extension. Once that extension was installed, you would have to reload Talky before you could share your screen. Until today, it was also necessary to click the "Share Screen" button again after the reload.
Now, after you've installed the extension, you're able to screenshare immediately, making the first-time experience faster and easier.
Unsurprisingly, JDD from the lodash projecttook notice. All things said and done, he made sure that in the 3.0.0 release they addressed all the concerns I mentioned in that post, which is great!
Specifically:
Individually published, and semver versioned modules. This was the big one.
Shallower dependency trees.
Memorable names and not having to remember folder structure. All the functions are now available on npm as lodash.* where * is the function name. So, you can now just npm i lodash.bind for example.
We are excited to announce that in a month’s time, &yet is teaming up with O’Reilly to bring training to Fluent Conf 2015 in San Francisco, California.
And, in a few weeks, we'll be announcing a Kickstarter. But more on that later—first I want to tell you about what's new in the Talky beta.
I hesitate to go all Jonny Ive on you, but seriously: the new version of Talky has been reconsidered, reengineered, and redesigned from the ground up. And everything we've been building has been open sourced as part of Otalk, our open WebRTC platform.
&yet is a highly distributed team, with yetis all over North America and Europe. To keep in touch, we use Talky on a daily basis for impromptu discussions among our teammates. Unfortunately, Talky doesn't quite work for our all-hands meetings because "full-mesh" media sharing only functions well when the number of people in the conference is small. To change that, we are working on an improved version that we've tested up to 20 people, internally known as Talky 2.
Last Friday we had another weekly update meeting and Talky 2 would not work - all the videos remained black. Switching from Chrome to Opera resolved the problem for a while, but at some point every participant in the conference had their browser crash. We had to switch back to Hangouts. Which was embarrassing.
What happened?
Crashing every browser (including Opera) was something I had been expecting. We had seen it before and currently it is being investigated by the WebRTC team. It is quite a serious issue and getting them more data to investigate what is going on helps. Showing black videos, on the other hand, was a behavior I had not seen before, so I went to investigate. I could not reproduce this behavior on my Linux laptop and It seemed to happen only on the Macintosh computer we use in our meeting room.
Recently, several members of our team participated in a week-long business simulation called Enterprise Week for a local school district. It was featured in an earlier post here and was also described in one of the December dispatches for our online community &you.
The week culminated with a touching and personal closing talk by former Enterprise Week participant, illustrator and yeti, Jaime Robles. We are very proud to now be able to present Jaime's talk to you.
