Blog

Optimizing a MySQL Server is a concern for many. Here are some of our own findings after deciding we needed to move from RDS to MySQL but were still faced with DB performance issues.

Now that we have started our closed beta of Qortex – our splendid and brand new communication platform – I would like to talk about what thinking went into creating it and why we needed to build our own platform rather than just use what was out there.

We were spread out over 5–7 platforms, which in itself isn’t necessarily bad, as long as those "realms" are mostly isolated and used by people who never cross over into each others’ realms. Which wasn't really the case after a while…

For one of The Plant's biggest sites we have started using mailcheck.js to offer corrections when there is a typo in the domain part of an e-mail address. When an e-mail address is entered and the domain part is spelt slightly differently to one of many known domains, mailcheck.js offers this known domain as a suggestion. We present this suggestion to the user, which need only be clicked to make the suggested correction.

In this week's TechForce, Frank Yue gives an introduction to IPTables and provides us some interesting examples of how they can be used to solve different problems.

Using closures comes with a performance costs compared to just using normal functions or anonymous functions. I benchmarked 3 scenarios for using closures, normal functions or anonymous functions.

1. Using anonymous functions (inline functions that do not reference any variables outside).
2. Using closures (referencing to variables outside of the function).
3. Direct normal function calls.

Here is the benchmark I wrote…

With Redis's rich support for Sets, we built a fast, realtime, full-text search.

Redis is one of the open source projects I'm currently most interested in. As a key-value store, Redis has the abillity to store data via its datatypes. In this article I will try to show the process of how we design and implement a simple clone of Twitter written using Ruby and Redis as the only database.

In this week's TechForce Junbin explores Goroutines: how they compare to processes and threads, how to create a Goroutine, how to communicate between multiple simultaneous Goroutines with channels. He then explains the potential pitfall and solution of shared variable names in simultaneous Goroutines.

Aaron demonstrates how to use the Google Go language and HTML5 Websockets to implement a simple web chat application in this week's TechForce

As you will have noticed by now, we have a completely new website. Just in time for this we have also moved our office in China to – what else – a plant. The new office in Hangzhou is now in a historic building, an old silk weaving mill and factory, surrounded by smaller buildings all with sawtooth roofs. We couldn't ask for better branding.

Living and working in Japan for 15 years, most of this time in companies where the foreigner count is below 3 and making daily use of Japanese written and spoken, has its virtues. Chinese characters can be utilised as a bridging element between several Asian languages, since they carry meaning independent of the spoken language, beyond language borders.