mtrichardson

I asked around looking around for what people used for an SSL-and-password-protected private IRC network. Idan very kindly mentioned that the IRC bouncer ZNC, which we were using anyway, supports a partyline. A partyline is a private room that's on the bouncer, independent of other networks. Since our ZNC is already behind SSL and password protected, the ability to do a private room on that bouncer fits our needs perfectly.

"...as writes occur old data will start migrating to other shards."

Thanks Adam for pointing this out.

We recently started using MongoDB at work and, I have to say, it's been an absolute dream so far.

Update: This keeps coming back to haunt me, often in humorous situations. Want to know why? Read Adam's dissection of our recent history.

So, full disclosure, I found out about Gowalla because they signed up to use Urban Airship. In other words, Gowalla uses Urban Airship, and I'm a cofounder at UA.

HOWEVER

That does not dilute Gowalla's awesomeness.

Gowalla is kind of like FourSquare - you check in at locations and your friends are notified that you have done so. I view these apps as an easy way to invite my friends to my location. And, yes, there is the game aspect of it. With FourSquare, you're competing on points and attempting to get mayorships. With Gowalla, you get items - beautifully done images, really - that you can swap with items at the spot you're at or others.

FourSquare has several advantages over Gowalla, such as a larger user base, restrictions to city limits (though I do enjoy seeing British friends checking in, it's not exactly useful information) and an API. However, it seems that Gowalla is working hard on these things, so I'm looking forward to them as well. Gowalla also requires that you be within a certain distance around the spot you're checking in at, which is nice.

Much like a luxury car vs. an economy car, or a Mac vs. a PC, it's the little features that are so well done that appeal to me about Gowalla. They have a great design and the app is rock solid. I'm definitely a fan.

I figured I should probably be talking a bit more about the tools that I/we use and love.

We use Yammer at work and it's fantastic. It fills a perfect niche for sharing information across our four-person team. I've also found that Gabble is the best client for it and, as of the latest update, it solves all but one of my minor beefs with it.

It now has image viewing inline (before attachments would often get lost), it will resize the text area without bumping the text below the screen if Gabble is at the bottom of the screen (this is a complicated description, but trust me, it was annoying), and a bug fix that never really affected me.

The only thing that Gabble could fix that's bothering me right now is that it often reposts an entire day's worth of Yammer entries (I refuse to call them "yams") to Growl, cluttering that up for a bit. I think this happens when it unexpectedly quits or updates.

At any rate, Yammer + Gabble is a very nice tool.

Kong is a way to run automated Twill tests against a suite of existing services. Simon describes it as a monitoring tool, which I don't think is quite accurate - I'd still use monit for that. This is a step above that, doing basic integration testing on production sites to make sure that everything appears happy. I definitely see a use for this, especially when managing a large number of sites that share a code base.