Logical Friday

Workers are dumb
When doing heavy lifting in a webapp (anything from video transcoding to calling an API), a common practice is to take this heavy lifting out of the request and process it in the background. Doing so means the page can finish loading nice and quickly for the user. A common way to accomplish this is to use a message queue and workers. And workers are dumb.

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Carrying on from my post on the Mint site, I wanted to share a little more information on what I think was the coolest part of my MIDEM Music Hackday hack – the technology.

But first a quick recap of the idea for those in the dark:

To answer the question “what do you listen to?” I created an app that analyses your recent listening history and awards Artist, Genre, Guilty Pleasure and Hipster badges based on certain criteria.

With that out of the way…

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Last night was the first Music/Tech meetup. It went really well and we had a blast. Lots of interesting folks came down, we had a few drinks, we had a good chat. It was fun. Why am I telling you about this on the Logical Friday technical blog? Because the way we decided to play music is quite interesting.

Because this was the Music/Tech meetup, we had to have music playing, and it had to be done in a needlessly complicated way. To that end, we decided to take a crack at making the playlist selection more egalitarian. Enter Collabify.

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We love using custom fonts with CSS @font-face declarations and have done so on a number of our recent projects. One thing has caught us out on a couple of occasions though. Here’s the scenario:

You’re building a site, everything is going well with the styling. Your custom font is looking good on your local version of the site, it’s been checked in staging and looks good there. You launch the site, it looks good everywhere… except Firefox. Your favourite development browser (well, mine at least, apparently some people like Chrome a lot these days) is no longer showing that lovely font. You can’t reproduce this on your own machine, everything seems lost.

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Whenever we are hiring at Mint Digital, it always amazes me some of the responses we get. Unfortunately often not in a good way. So if you are thinking of applying for a job (not just at Mint), here are a couple of handy tips I’ve noted based on the many applicants I have reviewed. Please note this list is specifically related to development jobs, however some, if not all, of these will apply to other industries.

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Mint has a great conference policy for its employees. Last year, the tech team at Mint traveled all over Europe and North America, attending and speaking at traditional technology conferences like Arrrrcamp, and Strange Loop, but also off-the-wall choices like San Diego Comic-Con and Lebowski Fest.

Last summer, I had an idea. There’s lack of large conferences in London that we would like to attend. Also, we have been attending a lot of conferences, and have a lot of experience about what we like and don’t like. So why don’t we just throw a conference ourselves?
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I’ve just implemented a no-issues policy on the Powder gem. I’ve disabled the issue tracker in the repo admin, and added the following to the readme:

Contributing
Powder now opperates a “no issues, just pull requests” policy. The gem really is so simple that there is no excuse not to fix any problems that you find, or implement any features that you want. Hack away, submit a pull request and we’ll be notified.

What are you waiting for? Get hacking!

I guess that’s pretty self explanatory. I wanted to mention a little as to why we implemented this.
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