Blog

Every web application needs to do things asynchronously. Be it that messages need to be passed to other parts of the app, or tasks that take a non trivial amount of time (sending an email, calling into another web service). Ideally, you spin these tasks off from the thread that services the web request and count on them being done in good time, without holding up the request. Until recently we used Resque for this. Resque is used in large installations and seems to be battle proof - for us however, it turned into quite a bit of pain. (That is the topic for another blog post). We replaced Resque with RabbitMQ for message passing and girl_friday for sending mails etc. Both choices have turned out to be excellent so far: We are happy with the stability and the ease of use. ...

When I did my Masters in Science, I had to take a number of modules on topics that were wasted time (“Web Programming in XHTML and PHP” being my absolute favorite time and energy wasting exercise), but one module where I learned heaps and heaps was “Security Engineering”. The course itself was so so (as - unfortunately most of the modules and courses that the University of Liverpool gave), but the book we were required to read was one of the best technical books I ever had the joy to read: Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (Amazon.de) Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (Amazon.com) It is a extremely accessible book, with load and loads of information presented in easy to read format, but with enough depth (and a fantastic list of sources) ...

We are almost back to normal here at Mobino dev center, and I wanted to share a video with you, that was made at Lift13 by Charbax and in a few minutes shows you both how the payment process with Mobino works, and some thoughts from our CEO about the product and were we are heading. Choice quotes from JF Groff include “credit cards are from the 60s” and “sorry, we don’t need you”… ...

To all of you who wondered what the day of woodcarving produced: A guitar stand for my Telecaster and the Norman acoustic. As you can see from the detail shot, I made a mistake in the geometry of the stand. The back is angled, so the lower support should have been angled too. There’s also a cut visible, but this one I left in deliberately. It is my rendition of Wabi Sabi. This is my first piece of wood cutting and I’m more than happy to show that (both the roughness of the whole piece and the imperfections that are due to my clumsiness) ...

Thanks to @baltasarw I spent most of today with Toni and Anneli Lengen in Stallikon, in their HolzSach Atelier carving wood - with a chainsaw… Starting with this large piece of poplar: I ended up with this: Do you know what it is? Will be revealed tomorrow…. And here are all 4 pieces…

3 intense days (and 2 intense weeks leading up to) of Lift13 are over. I didn’t have a chance to see much of the conference unfortunately, so I can’t say if it has been as good as previous ones - from my limited experience, I’d question that - but maybe some of my friends like @Stephtara who has been live bloging these conferences forever can answer for me. I have been busy with my colleagues and partners in crime JF Groff, Alex Lampis and Alvaro Fussen to demonstrate how Mobino works, talk to merchants, customers and partners and get a feeling for how our system is received “in the wild” (although it was a very friendly “wild” setting). After our share of problems before the conference, things ran smoothly during the conference, our servers behaved, the apps worked, people got it, the merchants got it (and loved it). Very, very satisfying to see (as I already said in an earlier blog post) ...