The game is the result of a competition involving over 600 primary school children. The children turned up armed with ideas & sketches of games they wanted to see built. The winning concept was “Whack a cake”. A game lasts 1 minute and the user has to collect good ingredients to gain points, if you select a bad ingredient you lose points. Each cake has 8 layers and the more cakes you complete the higher your score at the end.

After Multipack Presents, an event held by web designers/developers for other web designers/developers I visited the team down the corridor working on the game. At this time there was about 20 hours left to complete the game before it was demoed. I was soon tasked with building a Universal iPhone & iPad app that would hit the App Store with all proceeds going to Children in Need.

The game itself was built using HTML5 Canvas & Javascript. This alone wouldn’t be accepted in the Apple App Store as it could be visited and played on the website without the app, so I had to add a few extra features to enable it to hopefully get through the App Store approval process. These included sharing options and Game Center intergration. It will be hitting the App Store in the near future to raise money for Children in Need.

Over the past week the game has been covered on BBC Midlands Today & The Guardian. Thanks to Oxygen Accelerator who organized the project & everyone who worked on the game itself over the weekend. A great achievement to all those involved.

You can play Whack a Cake right now on the website. Go give it a try and see if you can beat the high score and don’t forget to donate to Children in Need.

Once upon a time AT&T had the largest database in the world, with almost 2 trillion rows detailing every phonecall they had ever received. Nowadays, Facebook grows by over 250 million photos every day and that number is only set to grow. As such, a new wave of databases have arrived, tailored towards the needs of the social web. Here at 383 Project, we have been using MongoDB (taken from the word humongous) to power several projects. It’s flexible but powerful schema and built-in features such as replication and MapReduce have made it a perfect fit.

Several of the talks at Mongo Conf dealt with how MongoDB can be leveraged to its full potential when working with real-time data – something we are expanding our use of at 383. Theo Hultberg from Burt, an ad metrics company, gave a very detailed talk on how to avoid the dreaded “Global Write Lock” MongoDB employs.

Their experience at handling millions of metrics provided insight into the problems they had encountered, along with the solutions. As one example, they found clearing large datasets caused a huge spike in latency for new inserts. By changing how they shared their data they could drastically reduce the impact of this process on other services. Throughout the presentation they explained that there is no such thing as a silver bullet, and all solutions will eventually reach a new bottleneck, as with any system.

Others at Mongo Conf expounded the benefits of Mongo’s JSON based document format. Unlike a traditional RDBMS which stores data as a set of fixed fields grouped as a single row, MongoDB employs the concept of documents each of which can contain any arrangement of fields including strings, integers and even arrays or other documents.

To show just how powerful this freedom in schema design is, Steve Francia (formerly with OpenSky) recalled how they built an e-commerce platform based on MongoDB. Using the example of simple products such as movies and books. The talk showed how traditional software (in this case Magento) required a horrendous schema with over 100 tables to accurately model basic information.

Fields like author or director, relevant to only one product type were either included for both or required additional tables whereas MongoDB could allow them to exist as necessary within each product’s document. Special mention was given however to the lack of true transaction support within MongoDB for elements like stock control. Francia concluded by saying that the hybrid system they eventually employed, with a traditional RDBMS storing financial and inventory information while Mongo contained everything else worked very well.

Phil Wills from The Guardian further explained the double-edged sword that such flexible schema can bring in production systems. The Guardian found that unless models were clearly defined before development began, documents were liable to end up with no consistent patterns, making code less and less maintainable. They also found that indexes, crucial to the performant operation of a system, could bring a system to its knees if not properly configured. One example showed a production facing music database suffering horrendous delays because of a single missing index.

Following on from The Guardian, a talk by Nosh Petigara described the geospatial-based indexes built into MongoDB by default and the power they provided. By harnessing latitude and longitude, Petigara managed to build a basic Foursquare clone, including Places, People and Checkins with location based queries (find me cinemas within 10 miles of my current location) within 30 minutes. This demo proved to be very popular, especially with the agile development crowd. It’s worth mentioning as well that Foursquare is one of the largest production websites currently running MongoDB with over a billion check-ins!

The final talk of the day, given by Brendan McAdams, delved much deeper into the internals of MongoDB. The vastly improved support for replication in version 2.0 was detailed, with cool features such as ensuring writes had propagated not only between nodes but also across named availability zones demoed. The improvements made go a long way to showing that MongoDB is now a viable and production-ready datastore.

At the end of the day both Leon and myself walked away (with a bag full of conference schwag) with a better understanding of not only the benefits to using MongoDB but also some of the limitations and potential pitfalls that using any new technology can bring.

Anna kicked off by highlighting how children are being monitored in School. With an ever increasing number of measures in place to track exactly what students are doing on the School network.

“The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net” Excerpt from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

While I feel some monitoring should be in place for obvious reasons, parents should have the opportunity to give permission to the School to monitor their child’s activity in this manner.

“The time has come for mobiles in schools to be placed in the category of a potentially offensive weapon.” 2007, NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates

To hear that mobile phones are seen as “offensive weapons” and that schools have the power to confiscate, examine data on the device and destroy data is truely shocking. Anna showed an inspiring video of a young South African who described how he had to write his 8,000 word business plan on a Nokia 6234; which just shows how useful having access to devices like mobile phones can be.

Anna then moved onto focus on ICT education in Schools. As mentioned in my last post it has been a few years since I left school and while the curriculum has developed since, the problem with what schools are teaching remains. When I was in school we were using Frontpage Express or Word to build websites, which meant most students at the school would not delve into HTML beyond changing some copy here and there.

“I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as a standard in UK schools.” Eric Schmidt

In 5 years the take-up of GCSE ICT in schools has dropped by 33%. (Source) The Royal Society suggest that the decline in students taking ICT is down to the design & delivery of the ICT curriculum in schools.

Children are taught to use PowerPoint and Word to create websites meaning they don’t see the HTML that makes up the website to ultimately learn the technologies behind the web. Mozilla are running their Hackasaurus program which aims to teach students how the web is built by making them look at the source of websites as well as making them “remix” elements onto their own pages.

Want to help?

I for one have been inspired to do what I can to improve the situation in Schools and have followed some of the steps provided by Anna within her talk to get the ball rolling.

• Register as a STEM ambassador.
• Write to your old school and offer to give a talk about what you do.
• Visit the TES’s ICT teacher forum and give advice.
• Help make open source projects like Hackasaurus better.
• Write to your MP and the Eduction Secretary.
• Sign this recent e-petition to “Teach our kids to code“.

In an interesting development since the talk at updateConf it has been announced on Twitter that David Willetts has announced a pilot programme to teach schoolchildren coding & to develop a programming GCSE.

A Barcamp “#codingforkids” is also being held in London next month with a plan to discuss and debate the topic. You can find details about the barcamp here.

See Anna’s “The Digital Native” slides here.

Unusability

To kick things off Matt Gemmell (or his evil twin) talked about Usability by giving us his “Inhuman interface guidelines”.

1. More is better.
2. Be useless.
3. Celebrate stupidity.
4. Do it your way.
5. Not found.
6. Boxed in.
7. Speak English.
8. Signted users only.

I’m sure if Matt Gemmell (and not his evil twin) had presented the talk you could take away the following points.

1. Do less
The old “Keep it simple, stupid” applied here. Don’t pack features into your app for the sake of it. Quality not quantity.

2. Be useful
Pack in useful functionality, consider how & where people are going to use your app.

3. Don’t be antisocial
Use social media to share information from your app but don’t use the worst features from social media websites to do so.

4. Support orientations
Allow the user to use the app how they wish. Don’t fix the user to use a single orientation it is their device.

5. Consider data retrieval
Make it easy for the user to find information easily, don’t hide information in hard to reach places.

6. Layout for ease
Use native UI elements which the user is familiar with, ergonomics is not only for the device but for the software as well.

7. Localise
If your app is going to be used in other countries localise the app, make it easy for people who don’t have English as their first language.

8. Be accessible
Ensure text is big enough to be read by people who may be visually impaired. Use native controls to ensure screen readers and the devices OS can employ its own accessability features without problems.

Corona hacking session

Seb Lee-Delisle performed some “Live Coding” and built a Angry Birds clone using a mobile development platform for iOS and Andriod called Corona. Within 30 minutes Seb had a ball knocking over a structure made up of blocks using the built in physics engine.

Seb got the audience involved in debugging the code and various members of the audience were following along creating their own clone during the talk. Corona itself looks like a great platform to base games off, it being simple enough to build a part of a Angry Birds clone in just over 30 minutes.

With the audience joining in to debug the code as well as many members of the audience following along creating their own clone the talk grabbed the attention of a fair few developers. Speaking to a few people after the talk everyone wanted to download Corona and build a game right there and then.

The Digital Native

Anna Debenham presented “The Digital Native” highlighting problems with the current model of teaching students. Being only a few years since I left school this is a topic I am all to familiar with and deserves a completely separate blog post, which will follow soon.

Thanks to Aral Balkan, Team Update and all the speakers for putting on such a good conference. Definitely worth a visit next year.

This post is aimed towards graduates that are looking to pursue a career as a web developer, with a few pointers to help you along your way.

The degree that I undertook offered many routes in terms on career choice; web, radio or TV. I chose to go down the web route, specifically as a web developer as I enjoyed the ASP and Flash modules (my final year project was to create a Flash based VLE with an ASP back end – that coincidently lead on to me working as a Flash based eLearning Developer, within the Knowledge Centre of BCU).

In contrast 3 years later, I’m now working as a lead developer here at 383 Project, specialising in PHP, MySQL and Actionscript. In that time I’ve picked up new skills and learnt new languages. University taught me how to acquire and understand knowledge, not necessarily the subject matter itself. Below are some pointers as to the skills that will make you stand out amongst other graduates and ultimately better yourself as a developer:

Read

Never underestimate the power of reading and gaining knowledge, even if this isn’t directly in your subject field. Set yourself up with a Google Reader account and add some tech feeds. Also Subscribe to a service such as Instapaper, and collect articles and posts to read at a later date.

Connect

Find a local meetup group and connect with other like minded developers. If you are in the Birmingham area, come along to HydraHack. This meetup isn’t specific to a particular language and is a great way to discuss general development topics. This will help to broaden your understanding of other development practices and techniques, and also help you to become more comfortable talking about your role and knowledge in general.

Build

Hook yourself up with a Github account and go and build something that you will use on a regular basis. This pet project can be as simple or complex as you like. Try something that will actually help you in your everyday workflow as you’ll be more inclined to add features and maintain it. Social coding will help you to get peer related feedback, plus if you can introduce a new technique or language along the way you’ll help to widen your skill set.

Interact

Set yourself up with an account on a site such as Stackoverflow or Forrst and participate in some healthy dev discussion. Even if you can’t answer any of the questions straight away, this will help you in your ability to answer questions. Remember it’s important to understand that a great developer won’t always know all of the answers straight away, but will know how or where to find the answers.

Write

Set yourself up with a blog and start writing about your experiences, knowledge and anything you feel would be good to start a discussion. You may find it tough starting out in terms of subject matter, but over time you’ll find your writing skills will improve. This will help you out when it comes to writing briefs and specs for clients.

In summary, you will never learn everything from a University course or a book, actual hands on experience is vital, and the more you can get the better you will become in your chosen field.

We love using WordPress, it’s a highly flexible CMS and provides a great interface for clients to manage content. However, when you need to deal with millions of requests across multiple servers, it’s time to think about strategies for High Availability. With a few additions alongside WordPress, it’s possible to deal with millions of requests across multiple servers:

Multiple Load Balanced Webservers

To have truly high available site, it’s important not to have a single point of failure. WordPress can easily be deployed to multiple webservers, running the same application and connecting to the same database with minimal fuss. Each of our webservers sits behind a dedicated load balancer; constantly health checking each server and distributing incoming requests between the websevers. If one of the servers becomes overworked the load balancer will automatically stop serving traffic to that particular webserver and only distributes incoming requests to servers which can accept connections. Once the webserver recovers, it will notify the load balancer that it is ready to accept incoming requests.

Varnish

We make heavy use of Varnish, the open source HTTP accelerator. We put Varnish in front of a normal Apache HTTP server, and it serves up cached resources extremely quickly and cheaply. When we publish new pages our cache is automatically purged so visitors always see the latest content. Using Varnish allows us to serve many more requests that we could with Apache alone.

Apache

Although Nginx is the new kid on the block, Apache is still great for performance, reliability and documentation. Because Varnish sits infront of Apache, it’s only contacted by requests by Varnish when it needs to update a an expired copy of a page.

Memcached

We use Memcached as shared caching layer between our application and our database. Each time our sites needs to query information from the database, it looks up the information in a shared Memcached cluster first. We use Memcached to store frequently access information such as query results because it’s faster than looking up the same frequently used information from the database or from a spinning hard drive. Using a shared cluster means that if one of the other webservers has recently made the same query, the results are instantly returned from a nearby host. If it’s a fresh query, once the database has returned the query results, we push this into the cache so that it be be reused until stale.

Our database server run on separate hardware to our web servers, which means we can allocate MySQL plenty of resources to deal with incoming query requests. Although thanks to Memcache, a high percentage of database reads never ever reach our database.

WordPress

Thanks to the flexibility and extendibility of WordPress, many of these extensions can be built right into the core WordPress engine. Plugins like W3 Total Cache, WordPress Varnish provide drop in functionality for automatically purging caches or abstracting databases requests with requests to Memcached.

Using this architecture of Multiple Webservers + Varnish + Apache + Memcached we’ve scaled WordPress across multiple servers, delivered (literally) millions of requests and protected our database server from being overworked.

Interactive Infographics.

This panel gave examples from some leading agencies producing infographics. Infographics involve the presentation of complex data in smart and beautiful ways.

The main concept I took from the panel was that effective visualisation is not about trying to tell a story around the data. It’s about allowing the data to tell it’s story.

Casey Capalowe of GOOD did a great talk running us through some of the fantastic data visualisations on the site. There’s a nice example above of some infographics produced for the Haiti relief effort, but the site is well worth a visit for full enjoyment.

Ben Fry used a great example to illustrate how effectively mapped data can really tell a story. The graphic above illustrated how water consumption trends were shaped during the Canadian olympic hockey final. Not the most beautiful, but certainly one of the most interesting examples of data telling it’s own story. There’s more here.

Ben also showed us this great example of how infographics can clearly illustrate a complex set of data when displayed correctly. The example above shows the entire growth of Darwin’s Origin of the Species from 150,000 words to 190,000. Using clear colour coding and some clever rendering, you can see establish in a few seconds where the revisions came in and in what order.

Next up was Shan Carter, part of the New York Times infographics department. They’ve done some fantastic work, but in particular I enjoyed the geo-mapping they’d done on the archived Twitter conversations during the recent superbowl. This tells a clear story of the game by displaying trends and themes and applying a weighting to volume of conversation. Again, this works best in it’s interactive guise, so head over to the site and click play.

Last on the panel was Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen who had about fifty things I’d like to put in to this blog! One really interesting example was some of the experiments they’d been doing mapping real time twitter trends using imagery to denote popularity. This gives an excellent insight in to chatter and seems a much more engaging way of displaying the data than some of the other tag cloud/wordle based systems I’ve seen on other sites. As well as the example above I highly recommend check out their site and blog for more.

Luckily today I made it in to the Evan Williams keynote – I say lucky, because the queue was long and there was a LOT of people!!

Evan is one of the co-founders of Twitter.

Disclaimer: these notes were made in real time and published as the talk finished so apologies for any typos or brevity.

@anywhere

Evan started by announcing a new app platform for integrating Twitter in to websites called ‘at anywhere’. The platform enables sites to integrate the platform in a number of ways.

These were the main headline benefits that were covered:

• The app can be customised by sites adopting it to match their intended use.
• Allows user to Tweet from the embedded site itself
• Follow a user straight through the site without users needing to jump back to Twitter – improved discovery costs.
• For site owners it enables them to leverage more followers.
• Should enrich the experience allowing users to build a community around their sites more easily.

Evan described the app as aiming to ‘reduce friction’ in terms of integrating the Twitter experience more richly away from Twitter.com

You can read more here

‘Experimentation creates value’.

The process of building a business is all about experimentation. It was recommended that finding where you’re going wrong through experimentation was one of the keys to building a rapidly growing business.

Twitter aim to create the best experience for users and businesses, they wanted to create a market, then figure out who to get a commercial benefit later.

Evan’s main involvement on a day to day basis is experience and strategy. He focuses on how he can build culture internally. How can the company scale? He aims for an internal parallel between the service (openness and transparency) and the company. They’re trying to grow with this methodology through ‘autonomous teams’ who are able to develop and follow a specific service benefit without needing to think of Twitter as a single entity. There is no one monolithic team or code base – that isn’t scaleable.

‘Openness’

‘A window is transparent a door is open. Window allows users to ‘see in’, but a door allows people to experiment and play.’ Evan used this sentence to illustrate their attitude to openness.

It was discussed wether openness gives away the ‘golden goose’ and can infact devalue a business. Twitter creates value by maximising the value in the eco-system and not necessarily in the ‘business’. The focus is on ‘How do we increase the value of the network? How do we give more value to users?’ not necessarily on ‘how do we build the value of Twitter’.

Businesses can be built around Twitter.

The third party developers using the Twitter API and building for Twitter create value for users and through proxy, for Twitter. Companies like Co-Tweet and Hoot Suite have improved the interface for a sub-audience within Twitter that Twitter couldn’t have reached with their all encompassing interface.

WIthin the eco-system Twitter has created there are opportunities for third party developers. Twitter need to balance managing the open-ness with managing the eco-system to keep it useful. This means they need to protect the main user base against things like spam projects built using the APi. The ecosystem needs ‘shepherding’.

Open value – building a network which reaches the weakest signals.

It was discussed how Twitter are aiming to bring a positive social benefit. An example was provided from a Chilean citizen who had emailed Twitter after the earthquakes thanking them for connecting them in a way that could aid rescue and help reestablish real world connections. Twitter is aiming to reach and connect users who can humanly get value and benefit from the service in countries like Haiti, India, China and Iran.

How does Twitter define a ‘user’

There are many dormant accounts on Twitter. Evan considers anyone who gets value from the eco-system as a user. This isn’t about Tweeting, or even signing up, it’s about wether value can be found in the data pool of those active users who broadcast from the space.

The cookies are out of the Oven.

Evan mentioned that one of the principles of Twitter was to create an information network with meaningful outcomes. This may be something as simple as a tweet service which lets a business and customers know that cookies are ready, or something as powerful as Tweeting within countries where there are firewalls or barriers to information (China etc).

All in all an interesting keynote and a nice insight in to Twitter and its culture.

Just about the best CG you could hope to see. Highly recommend viewing this in HD over on Vimeo.

It’s that time of year when everything gets a bit Christmasssy at 383 Project and as such we wanted to share a new competition – the 383 Christmas album.

The premise is simple- find or create an interesting photo of a ’383′, add a message and send it through to us. There’s more details of how to enter on the site.

In the new year we’ll pick a winner and runner up to receive a Flip Mino HD camera and Holga 35mm camera respectively.

There have already been some great submissions, so get going…