I tweeted yesterday (25th Jan 2012) to ask if anyone knew of a solution as convenient as Heroku but based in the UK or Europe.
The reason I asked was at Zopa we are thinking of migrating our front-end over to a Ruby stack and Heroku was the obvious option for hosting such a solution. However, as 95% or more of our traffic comes from the UK it doesn’t make complete sense to host our website outside of the UK or Europe at worst.
I got a lot of interest from Twitter as to whether I found anything but no suggestions of similar services based this side of the pond. At the same time I sent an email to Heroku’s support asking if they had any plans to give an UK or European hosting option.
Heroku got back to me yesterday evening and said they have no immediate plans for server resources outside the US but they are working on Safe Harbor certification if your concerns are of a more legal nature. They also confirmed that they are hosted within the US East region of AWS which is better than West for Europeans.
Their suggested strategy is to use a CDN alongside Heroku so that the majority of your assets will come from a local source and only your dynamic content will come from the US.
This probably rules out Heroku for us at Zopa as a CDN adds needless complexity for us given our traffic volumes and the fact that almost all of our traffic is from the same location. However, I thought I should knock a blog post together to share what I found.
I’m doing a talk at Skills Matter on 30th January titled “Gain Trust and Create Change” for the London .NET user group.
Registration has opened so reserve yourself a place.
If you run a user group and would like me to present this topic then drop me an email and I’ll try and arrange something.
Yesterday, I gave a presentation on Backbone.js at the inaugural DDD North. My thanks go out to Andrew Westgarth and his team for organising it, it was a great event.
I was a bit nervous as it was my first time speaking at a conference and I think it showed. I rattled through my presentation at break-neck speed, unfortunately finishing well under my allocated hour. Niall Merrigan gave me some tips for sorting that out so I’ll hopefully be more composed next time!
I’d like to thank everyone who showed up for my talk and look forward to receiving their feedback. The slides for my presentation are now up on Slideshare and the code I demonstrated is available on Github.
I was going to compile a similar list of resources for my upcoming talk on backbone.js at DDD North but Derick Bailey beat me to it. Check it out.
I came across Finagle a few weeks ago, it’s:
… a protocol-agnostic, asynchronous RPC system for the JVM that makes it easy to build robust clients and servers in Java, Scala, or any JVM-hosted language.
And they’ve now written a blog post announcing it to the world. I had a skim over it before but it looks like they’ve added to the documentation since then.
I’ve been looking for a framework for writing servers in Scala, the Play framework is on my radar for web applications, and this looks like a great contender.
I remember watching one of the original presentations on this architecture a few months ago (no idea why I didn’t link to it at the time) and Martin’s article puts it into a format that’s easier to consume at your leisure.
Really interesting approach!
I cannot stress how much I agree with this. I’ve come to exactly the same conclusions as Zach in the last year myself. I wish I had written this post myself!
Here are my highlights:
Documentation is the best way to communicate your thoughts to yourself.
Forcing myself first to consider the API, the interface, and the end result led to a clarity that inspired less code and a more impactful project.
It improves the clarity of my code. I get more done in less lines.
But documenting your code is cool as hell. More importantly, it makes me feel more confident about my own code.
This morning I signed up for GiveCamp UK. It is an event taking place this October in London where people involved in the software industry are donating a weekend of their free time to help charities with the IT needs.
What is GiveCamp? from givecamp on Vimeo.
If you can spare the time then sign up as a volunteer or if you work for a charity who could use some help submit a proposal. I have no doubt it is going to be a great weekend which will make a real difference to several charities.
