Active Product Development

Zuck at Techcrunch Disrupt 2012

guest — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 21:52:58 GMT

Chris Ferguson, Development Manager for Active.com, and I have been at Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this week. We're here to stay in touch with the latest in technology and to spread the good word about The Active Network. Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to speak at 2, and this was his first public speech since Facebook went public earlier this year. We knew his would be a popular session, so we got to the conference early in order to score a good seat. Our sacrifice paid off as we were 5 rows from the front of the stage (about 30 feet). And to put this into context, there are about 200 rows setup in the conference hall.

The place was packed, and people were crowding toward the front of the stage as they would if we were at a Pearl Jam concert. Zuckerberg does enjoy rockstar status after all. Here's a shot I took looking backwards from my seat.

When the CEO of Facebok finally took stage, I was able to snap a great picture with my iPhone.

Michael Arrington interviewed him. Arrington is by far the best interviewer at the conference this year. I agree with one attendee when she tweeted "I wish @arrington did all the interviews. He's like the Jon Stewart of Startups". As for me, I felt like a school girl seeing Justin Beber in person for the first time. Regardles of how insightful his first public appearance in recent months may have been, it was amazing to be in the presence of such an influential technologist.

HAML vs. ERB

guest — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 23:25:01 GMT

Three of the products I run technology for are built in Ruby on Rails. Two of those projects use HAML as the view templating language, while the third is in ERB. In an informal effort to explore the pros and cons of each to determine if standardization across teams was necessary I ignited a religious war. Some are passionately pro-HAML, while others are passionately pro-ERB. Today, in order to be more objective about things, I held a meeting with all of the Ruby developers to compare the two. Here's what we came up with:

And here's a translation (black - "pro", red - "con")

HAML	ERB
Faster Coding	Close to HTML
Close to CSS Syntax (+1)	Generally Understood
Forced Formatting	Standard (+1)
Scanability (+3)	ERB is applicable to all view files (via extension)
Value given to Whitespace (+2)	Overly Verbose
Value given to Whitespace (yes, someone argued this as a positive)	HTML is Error Prone (i.e. missing closing tags)
Tendency to Over Use Divs	Closer to what the Browser Sees
Less Code	Closer to other languages (+1)
Learning Curve (+1)
Ruby Conditional Statements cannot be Intermixed withing JS blocks
Not standard and likely won't be
Forces succint Views
Follows the spirit of Ruby (beautiful code)
Looks like Perl with Excessive Symbols
"Shells" out to other languages

Given this list, we had a healthy debate about the value of each templating language. In the end we decided the differences between the two weren't great enough to refactor our code in the name of standardization. But we did decide to use ERB as the default, namely because of its proximity to other languages (i.e. PHP) and the correlating low ramp up time when training new developers in Ruby on Rails (including HTML/CSS developers). So, with any new project we initiate in Rails there has to be a good reason not to use ERB, and a discussion will ensue to make a decision about which is best for said project.

Engineers with Many Talents

guest — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:31:52 GMT

I like to think we're somewhat of an eccentric crowd here at Active, at least on the engineering side. Case in point, watch our very own Marc Leglise, blackbelt and Senior Software Engineer, break bricks while still a student at UCSD:

AR Drone at Active

guest — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:41:44 GMT

Our very own Marc Leglise brought a new toy to work today to harass his co-workers with. Check out this Parrot AR Drone 2.0 in action flying over desktops and skimming people's heads here in the office.

Every Millionth Record

guest — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:26:44 GMT

Our Results development team has spent the past few months building a brand-spankin' new product to replace the old one. And in order for this brand-spankin' new product to work properly, we need to move data into it from the old database. Well, they decided to add a little liveliness to an otherwise boring exercise which can be witnessed below:

Oh, and get a sneak peak of what we're working on at http://resultsbeta.active.com.

Dumping Google Maps

guest — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:16:07 GMT

Update: It looks like a bunch of other companies, including Foursquare, have also ditched Google Maps.

We've been proud users of Google Maps on Active.com for 3.5 years. We used them to show where events are happening and provide driving directions to participants. Underneath the hood, we used Google's Geocoding API to discover the latitude and longitude for events so we could properly render them on maps. Geocoding also enabled searching by location on Active.com Search.

But then, on 26 October, 2011, a date that will live in infamy, Google announced usage limits on Google Maps. The new terms limited websites to 25,000 free map renderings per day. And Google reserved the right to put ads on those using maps for free. Or, websites could negotiate a usage-based deal with Google should their volume exceed 25,000 per day. In our case, we were looking at millions of renderings per day.

We scrambled for options.

Our first was to approach Google and try to work out a deal. After several email exchanges and phone calls, we just couldn't justify paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for maps. Second, we looked at Bing's offering and found their terms to be similarly disagreeable.

Then we found OpenStreetMap. And after more digging around, we discovered that MapQuest was huge proponent of OpenStreetMap (God bless 'em), which lended credibility to the service (as did recent accusations of Google's tampering with OpenStreetMap data). MapQuest had developed an open service called Open Platform Webservices which was built on top of OpenStreetMap's abundant data sources. The platform offered to free access to what are called "tiles" - images pieced together to render a complete map. It also offered access to a service called Nominatim, which could geocode our events like the Google Geocoding API used to.

Armed with a good alternative we set forth and worked to replace Google Maps with MapQuest's offering. In the spirit of being good citizens and not overloading MapQuest's "open" servers, we did the following:

Nominatim is our primary geocoding provider. We fall back to other commercial offerings when Nominatim is unable to deliver the precision (address-level) we need. Geocoding is abstracted by an internal service.
Every map rendering is a single image drawn from MapQuest's Open Static Map service, which pulls its data from OpenStreetMap.
We cache these images on our CDN (Akamai) for a period a time so that only uncached requests actually hit MapQuest servers.
When a user clicks on a map to interact with it, javscript fires to pull in MapQuest tiles allowing the user to move the map around, zoom in and zoom out.

You can see it in action on the Gate River Run event details page:

I think it's a good move for Google to look for financial compensation with its Maps product. I'm sure they ran the numbers and expected some developers, like us, to jump ship while others would embrace their new cost structure. In our case, the numbers didn't make sense, especially with a great alternative like MapQuest on OpenStreetMaps.

Halfway Through Hackathon 2011

guest — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:30:04 GMT

It looks like this is becoming an annual occurrence. We're halfway through Hackathon 2011 here at The Active Network. I took some video of what folks are working on. Enjoy:

Developer Week - Python 101

guest — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:46:23 GMT

Software Engineer Alan Tree teaches us the fundamentals of Python:

Python 101

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Gardening Q&A

guest — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:18:30 GMT

Get your gardening questions answered at http://www.wiltedleaf.com

Developer Week - Git 101

guest — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:33:06 GMT

Alex Turner, Senior Software Engineer at The Active Network, walks us through the fundamentals of the Git source control management system:

Git 101

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Developer Week - HTML 101

guest — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:32:25 GMT

Jeremy Spitzberg, our Web UI Development Manager, teaches us the fundamentals of HTML:

HTML 101

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Developer Week - Rails 101

guest — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:42:30 GMT

Continuing our effort to share what we've covered during Developer Week, Rob Cameron (again) teaches us about the beauty of Ruby on Rails:

Rails 101

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Developer Week - Ruby 101

guest — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:17:32 GMT

We're in the midst of Developer Week here at Active - a mini conference for employees to share knowledge about technology. Rob Cameron gave a great presentation yesterday about Ruby, and I thought I'd share his slides below:

Ruby 101

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Jeff Bezos on Amazon and Zappos

guest — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:40:47 GMT

I'm reading Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos). In it, Tony provides a link to a message that Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) had for the Zappos employees when Amazon acquired them. I found Jeff's obsession over the user to be quite inspirational:

Optimized Event Details

guest — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:54:14 GMT

Today I'm happy to announce that we've released an optimized version of the event details pages on Active.com. About 60% of our events will have this new format, and we're working steadily in the background to get this number to 100%.

Old Version

The old version made use of tabs and had pertinent information scattered throughout the page.

New Version

The new version of the page completely does away with tabs, has all of the pertinent information needed to make a registration decision up at the top (including details on whether or not the event is almost full, and whether or not the price is going to change). We also feel that the new design is much cleaner than the old and hope you have a better experience getting the information you need when signing up for an event!