New AppFog Twitter Accounts

Here at AppFog, we’ve been working hard to build out our support team while continuing to deliver the support you’ve come to expect from us. And so we decided that it’d be best to expand the number of two-way communication channels between our support team and the developers that use AppFog. Beginning today, in addition

June 29, 2012 0 Comments Read More

LinkedIn brings some sanity to the node.js debate

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably pretty sick of the whole node.js debate. Node has been called cancer (which Ted Dziuba called it in a rant which isn’t linked here because it has now been removed from his personal web page). It’s probably been called much worse. It’s been sardonically labelled as bad-ass rock

June 29, 2012 4 Comments Read More

Without them your app is a wafer in the wind: on data models and persistence

Hey, folks, it’s me again, with some thoughts on data models and why they are almost ridiculously important. I’d like to begin with a tl;dr-style declaration followed by some elaboration: data models are what allow apps to communicate with themselves over time. Learning programming vs. developing within a framework My story in learning development has

June 28, 2012 0 Comments Read More

New Relic gets even better. Developers rejoice.

By now, it’s no secret whatsoever that New Relic provides a phenomenal set of tools. They call their tools “X-Ray Vision For Developers,” and that’s almost an understatement. Here at AppFog, we like them so much that we offer New Relic support as a free add-on for PHP Fog apps hosted on dedicated clouds. On Monday,

June 27, 2012 4 Comments Read More

NoOps is a New Ops: AppFog is an Ops Company

A few months back, we helped to ignite a fairly heated debate when we used the term “NoOps” in a piece published by GigaOm arguing that a new era in development is just around the corner. While we vigorously defended the term against some of its detractors, we do understand why the term awakened misunderstandings

June 25, 2012 0 Comments Read More

Our Customers do the Best Things

We have a ton of great customers and wanted to share one with you…in hopes you’ll share with your friends and colleagues as well. The 30Love is a worldwide charitable art project that asks people around the world “what does love mean to you?” The answers can be found at their website, in the 30Love

June 21, 2012 0 Comments Read More

Infrastructure neutrality is now an absolute necessity: reflections on the AWS outage

Fact: AWS’ outage last week is the kind of thing that we can expect from data centers forever. Unfortunately, outages are part of the nature of the beast. All hardware infrastructures of all sizes and all degrees of complexity fail sooner or later, and data centers (“cloud” or otherwise) are no exception. It’s what happens

June 19, 2012 0 Comments Read More

The developer’s toolkit: CoffeeScript

There’s no denying it: the world of JavaScript is exploding right now. If you follow the web dev community on Twitter, Hacker News, etc., not a day goes by that you don’t hear about a new JavaScript library seeking to buttress the already-massive JS arsenal. A few weeks ago, I talked a bit about the

June 14, 2012 0 Comments Read More

Thing that makes life just grand of the day: seven databases in song

It’s not like me to do a post where I just share something that has come to my attention and provide little side commentary, but I have to make an exception for this: The song is a companion to the recently-released “Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement,”

June 13, 2012 5 Comments Read More

PHP: the quiet powerhouse

It’s been very interesting beginning my trajectory in web development in 2012. I come to all of this at a time when PHP is no longer trendy and has caught flak in certain corners for quite some time. A lot of this probably has to do with the fact that PHP has been around for

June 13, 2012 98 Comments Read More

Blog

: June 2012