Braindump by Date

• 08 Sep 2013 » Real-time Leaderboards with ElastiCache and Redis Objects

  With the launch of AWS ElastiCache for Redis this week, I realized my redis-objects gem could use a few more examples. Paste this code into your game’s Ruby backend for real-time leaderboards with Redis. read more...

• 06 Apr 2013 » Linux Network Tuning for 2013

  Linux distributions still ship with the assumption that they will be multi-user systems, meaning resource limits are set for a normal human doing day-to-day desktop work. For a high-performance system trying to serve thousands of concurrent network clients, these limits are far too low. If you have an online game or web app that’s pushing the envelope, these settings can help increase awesomeness. read more...

• 01 Dec 2012 » Replacing Macbook HD with an SSD

  My poor little laptop hard drive had been whining and whimpering, so I upgraded it to an SSD. Turned out to be inexpensive and very DIY friendly, so here are my cliffs notes. read more...

• 10 Feb 2011 » Controlling What You Can

  Yesterday, my good friends up at United Front Games had their game True Crime cancelled by Activision. My team worked closely with United Front on ModNation Racers, so I know firsthand that UFG is a standup studio of hardworking guys and gals. read more...

• 14 Jun 2010 » Atomic Rant Redux

  My atomic rant has gotten a ton of traffic - more than I forsaw.  Seems atomicity is a hot topic in the web world these days. Increasing user concurrency, coupled with more interactive apps, exposes all sorts of edge cases. I wanted to write a follow-up post to step back and look at a few more high-level concerns with atomicity, as well as some Redis-specific issues we’ve seen. read more...

• 18 Feb 2010 » An Atomic Rant

  You are probably not handling atomic operations properly in your app, and probably have some nasty lurking race conditions. The worst part is these will get worse as your user count increases, are difficult to reproduce, and usually happen in your most critical pieces of code. (And no, your unit tests can’t catch them either.) read more...

• 16 Oct 2008 » Doppelganger spotted in London!

  Many people go their whole lives without finding their doppleganger, but not me. By chance last weekend I picked up a New York Times and flipped to the Business section. There, staring back at me, was this! read more...