Behind Cheddar’s Server
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So, tech doesn't matter. Tech is interesting though. Here's some of what I use to make Cheddar's server. A lot of Cheddar is on the server. I've spent way more time writing Ruby than writing Objective-C when it comes to Cheddar.
The Cheddar web app is written in Ruby on Rails. I choose Ruby on Rails because I already have a lot of experience with it and it let's me work quickly.
For awhile, the API and the web app were two separate Rails apps. The web app simply used the API. This quickly became hard to manage and test. I ended up merging them back together before launching. The API is still very separate from the web app. At some point, I would like to split it out once I have more time to work on my internal tools.
Founders Talk Interview
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I recently had the honor of being on Founders Talk. Adam Stacoviak and I talked for an hour and forty minutes about how I got started programming, my journey through the years, Hipstamatic, starting Nothing Magical, and Cheddar.
We talk about some pretty personal stuff that greatly shaped my life. I'm pretty excited to look back and listen to this in several years. Anyway, give it a listen if you're interested.
Update 08/07/12: Founders Talk Part 2
Scaling Cheddar
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The first few days of the Cheddar launch was rough. I got hammered the first day with over 40,000 views to the website (not including API traffic). At one point, I was running 40 dynos (Cheddar runs on Heroku).
After awhile, a pattern became clear. There would eventually be some request queueing visible in New Relic and then all requests would just time out. I was using one of the beta databases on Heroku (Crane). The amazing @mattt suggested that I switch to a dedicated one, but that didn't seem to help.
Now for the best part, everything was down for 12 hours due to an AWS outage. The power went out in the datacenter. This blows my mind. Datacenter 101 is backup generators with backups for those. Anyway, this totally sucked.
Ask Me Something About Cheddar
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Answered a question on Quora about Cheddar. It was kinda fun. Ask some more.
Update 06/22/2013: I no longer own Cheddar. More info.
Boredom & Change
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I've been doing iOS since the day it was announced. It's been great. I have to say though it's getting old.
Most everything is download stuff from the network, store it in Core Data, and display it in a table view. Make a few custom controls here and there or some fun animations. That part is fun, but that's a small part of it.
I think I'm getting over just programming in general. I love creating stuff, don't get me wrong. Just starting to realize that typing all day isn't the only way to achieve the good feeling that I created something.