Mint Digital

Just back from RailsConf Europe. These were my three top moments:

1. Jason Hoffman’s session on scaling was really superb. Over the last few months we’ve had to deal with scaling a Rails app urgently. Jason had sound advice and interesting perspectives.

The headline is scaling isn’t a Rails problem but a network and hardware issue. Interesting things Jason suggested:

• Use multiple asset hosts to get more connections to the browser (e.g. most browsers will open only 2 connections per host, if you set up media1, 2, 3 and 4 for assets even if they all point to the same box, the browser will open up to 8 connections.
• Use DNS in a major way.
• Make separate apps for each controller and keep them on their own boxes/processes. This may sound strange, but Jason said most apps could have the following DNS (either on the same box or different ones):
  • Dynamic (domain.com)
  • Static (assets1-4, 5-8)
  • Uploads (break into separate app)
  • Downloads (unauthenticated to static servers, 60 secs urls for authenticated)
  • Admin

2. Evan Phoenix spoke well on Rubinius the new Ruby virtual
machine. It was a really fun talk with some carefully made up graphs and stats. The bottom line is that it is much faster, takes less memory and is much easier to fix bugs or extend as most is written in Ruby.

3. For me, the real highlights were the events surrounding the conference. Both Bratwurst on Rails on the Sunday and Reject Conf on Tuesday night were great places to meet with loads of interesting people, including the guys from SoundCloud and my fellow countrymen from Scotland on Rails.

MobileCrunch has a nice review of the Thumbplay community site we just launched.

They say “this is for those who want to record those special moments on their phone and share them for the world”.

Nice to see they understand the mobile aspect of what we are building.

At the end of November, Mint is dividing into two teams for a long weekend of coding. Each team has four days to build and launch a web app.

We thought we’d do this to:

• Spur creative thinking
• See what we’d come up with
• Have the fun of starting with a blank sheet of paper
• Focus on a project in a small team

The rules are:

• Max 5 people in a team
• No .net*
• Stop working at 5 on Sunday - what’s live then gets judged.
• Before the Weekender you can spend as much time as you want brainstorming and researching the concept. Also, you can register a domain name and set up the plumbing.

Does anyone else want to join? We thought it would be interesting to open it up and see what other people get up to…

I’m imagining each team would work separately. We’d have a wiki so that teams can report back progress. We’d meet on the evening at the start of the Weekender for a drink. At the end we’d have a party. We’d find some neutrals to judge. We’d invite a celebrity (probably Cameron Diaz) to present the prize.

If you’d like to get involved, email andy@mintdigital.com

* Joke! You can if you want.

Update: This got postponed. It will now happen on the 28th Feb - 2nd March.

We’ve just launched a community site for US mobile content provider Thumbplay. The community section has tight integration with the rest of the Thumbplay site (using BloomBox’s RESTful API to share content). Also, it’s the first BloomBox site with mobile upload and download.

The clip above isn’t the launch of Thumbplay community. In fact, it’s my wedding. My wife and I just had 1300 professional photos delivered, but I’ll spare you. Here’s a couple of user-generated ones: the MC and the henna (preparation) day.

The 2007 New York Television Festival (September 5th - 9th) presents independent TV pilots and network screenings for both industry professionals and TV fans.

As well as the parties and the premieres there is the NYTVF Panel Discussion Series. This begins on Thursday, September 6th with a talk sponsored by Mint Digital: Digital Frontiers in the Advertising Marketplace (scroll down page for details).

To obtain a pass, visit www.nytvf.com and click on Box Office. Thursday Day Passes, All Access Passes and Industry Packages grant admission to the Mint Digital panel and the A&E Cocktail reception that follow the panel, as well as the FOX red-carpet première of “New Amsterdam” on Thursday night.