Our Blog

Company Update August 2012

By Zed Jensen
August 24, 2012

Everyone here at End Point has been busy lately, so we haven’t had as much time as we’d like to blog. Here are some of the projects we’ve been knee deep in:

• The Liquid Galaxy Team (Ben, Adam, Kiel, Gerard, Josh, Matt) has been working on several Liquid Galaxy installations, including one at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center in Santa Cruz, and one for the Illicit Networks conference in Los Angeles. Adam has also been preparing Ladybug panoramic camera kits for clients to take their own panoramic photos and videos. The Liquid Galaxy team welcomed new employees Aaron Samuel in July, and Bryan Berry just this week.
• Brian B. has been improving a PowerCLI script to manage automated cloning of VMware vSphere virtual machines.
• Greg Sabino Mullane has been working on various strange PostgreSQL database issues, and gave a riveting presentation on password encryption methods.
• Josh Tolley has been improving panoramic photo support for Liquid Galaxy and expanding a public health data warehouse.
• David has been at work on a web-scalability project to support customized content for a Groupon promotion, while continuing to benefit from nginx caching. He has also been working on the design of highly-available PostgreSQL clusters with multiple indepdent synchronization requirements, and SEO maintenance work on an Interchange-driven site.
• Ron has been adding shop functionality and DevCamps to several client websites.
• Phin has been working on a Django-based inventory app to help End Point keep track of servers, virtual machines, updates, backup verification, and other details about our hosting, monitoring, and other infrastructure concerns.
• Steph has been busy on a Piggybak Ruby on Rails 3 project that is scheduled to launch soon, and she continues to work on other Rails and Interchange projects.
• Jeff has been integrating support for promotion codes for two clients’ websites, and adding a third-party database support to another client website.
• Carl set up automated emails for expiring subscriptions, added a separate website that runs from a client’s main admin, and set up a way to show product pages in a third-party website within an iframe.
• Josh Williams recreated an existing environment in Amazon Web Services EC2 instances and helped multiple clients with streaming replication on PostgreSQL.
• Phunk has been busy wrapping up a large Rails 3 project and is transitioning to another large Rails 3 with a nice API and elegant metadata management using ElasticSearch, CouchDB, OAuth2 and jQuery.
• Marina has been working on several Rails projects, including building out a new Rails 3.2 site with RailsAdmin and integration of several third-party community rich features.
• Greg D. has been building out functionality to help users create data visualizations for another client using Django and Weave. He also recently gave a company presentation on popular JavaScript libraries.
• Jon has been interviewing candidates for our Ruby on Rails developer position. There have been lots of strong applicants. He’s also been looking into Git’s post-checkout hook for some added automation, troubleshooting some RPM build problems, and adding Rails (for RailsAdmin) to an existing Sinatra site via some neat nginx configuration. And he continues to be surprised by how bad Amazon’s EC2 I/O and CPU performance can be.
• Mark set up PayPal for two Interchange clients and set up saved credit cards via Authorize.Net CIM integration for another.
• Mike has been busy at work on a large scale Spree project building out custom support for custom CSS and account management integration.
• And finally, Rick has been holding down the fort which includes integrating new clients, keeping our many current clients happy, managing company finances, and keeping the machine running and well-oiled overall!

As you can see, we’ve got a lot of variety here, so let us know if you’d like to hear more on any of these topics, or if some features we’ve developed for others may be useful to you.

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