Thomas Witt

Now that things have settled down from the move to Rackspace, I wanted to take some time to go over the architectural changes that we’ve made in order to bring you a speedier, more scalable GitHub. In my first draft of this article I spent a lot of time explaining why we made each of the technology choices that we did. After a while, however, it became difficult to separate the architecture from the discourse and the whole thing became confusing. So I’ve decided to simply explain the architecture and then write a series of follow up posts with more detailed analyses of exactly why we made the choices we did. There are many ways to scale modern web applications. What I will be describing here is the method that we chose. This should by no means be considered the only way to scale an application. Consider it a case study of what worked for us given our unique requirements. - Thomas Witt

This plugin allows you to easily integrate SWFUpload to your Ruby on Rails application - Thomas Witt

When I first stumbled across SWFUpload about two years ago I was impressed by how easy it was to implement. However, their example code has always bugged me as being rather crap, having to assign a separate global event handler for each event, and the lack of multiple handlers for a single event. Using jQuery (the solution to all things painful), I've written a plugin to create a real event dispatcher for SWFUpload without modifying the SWFUpload core! - Thomas Witt

SWFUpload is a small JavaScript/Flash library to get the best of both worlds. It features the great upload capabilities of Flash and the accessibility and ease of HTML/CSS. See it in action.... - Thomas Witt

Mint logo.Earlier this week, Intuit, the software company that owns the popular personal-finance software programs Quicken and TurboTax, agreed to pay $170 million in cash for Mint.com, a two-year-old startup whose free tools allow chastened customers to manage their personal finances online. Some critics, such as Web entrepreneur Jason Fried, view the deal as a defeat for upstarts: A wounded incumbent that charges hefty fees for its services is taking out a free competitor for a relatively small sum and increasing its market power. (Last year, Slate's "Shopping" column tabbed Quicken.com and Mint.com as the best online tools for keeping track of personal finances.) But the all-cash deal, which will provide a hefty payday for the company's founders and venture capital investors, represents a triumph of a new business model. Indeed, the sale of Mint.com may be the first big payoff for a Web 2.5 company. - Thomas Witt

I use Postfix to relay system messages (e.g. a botched cronjob) over SSL to my Gmail account. These messages are otherwise “lost” because the email is being sent to a dormant mail transfer agent on my Mac. There’s way more that you can do with Postfix, but I’ll just cover the setup I did for my needs. - Thomas Witt