Authentication models for hosting platforms require more considerations due to 3rd party api access. We wanted to be able to issue user auth tokens for 3rd party apps (think OAuth), as well as be able to verify authentication of local native api calls (through our iframe native app hooks). Our solut...

Migrating 17M rows with no downtime - Isotope Scenario: 17M rows in a table, constant writes/reads, slave/master setup. If you try to run an ALTER TABLE (especially on older versions of MySQL), most operations will lock the table for writes for the entire run-time of the query. To avoid this, we nee...

Moving On As of January I am no longer with Clay. I've learned so much over the past year and a half, more so than I could have ever imagined. Every minute working on Clay was a joy, and without a doubt one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. As for my next adventure, stay tuned. Lesson 1...

The CoffeeScript Web Framework Zorium (source) is the web framework we use at Clay.io. Today it has finally reached version v1.0.0 (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ This has been one of the most challenging projects I've worked on, with many great lessons learned. What follows is how Zorium came to be what it is today, ...

Architecture Service Oriented Architectures can be one of the most iterable and available software configurations for building almost any product. There are many challenges that come with these systems, probably the biggest of which is service discovery. This is how your services will communicate wi...

Intro At Clay, our deploy process is fun. Seriously. Because we use Docker. Docker is a containerization tool that allows for easy application isolation and deployment. The basic idea is that Docker runs your application in a virtualized isolated environment, similar to a virtual machine, but withou...

Managing 20+ servers as a small team is no easy task, and when things go wrong (they always do) figuring out what happened quickly is essential. Of course we can't ssh into each machine, that would take ages, so instead we use Logstash to aggregate our logs. This is the second post in my 10x series,...

This is the first post in my new series 10x, where I share my experiences and how we do things at Clay.io to develop at scale with a small team. Update: 10x: Logging at Clay.io 10x: Docker at Clay.io The Cloud CloudFlare CloudFlare handles all of our DNS, and acts as a distributed caching proxy with...

dotfiles i3 - Tiling Window Manager A tiling window manager is a type of window manager that arranges your windows as tiles, usually in such a way that makes managing them more efficient via keyboard shortcuts. i3 is my window manager of choice, after having used xmonad for a long time, i3 provides ...

Web | Android | Chrome | Amazon | Firefox | Source Welcome, to Fuco (Source), a coloring game! Fuco was made in 48 hours as part of the Ludum Dare game compo. The theme was Connected Worlds, which game me the inspiration for Fuco. Originally I had an idea for a game that mixed game art styles (pixel...