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Over the last ten years, the servers that power jQuery and its associated projects have evolved from a single shared webhost to a complex fleet of more than thirty virtual machines. Recently, I have been working with the jQuery Foundation to reel in this decade of organic growth by standardizing the configuration management of our […]

Illustration by Christine An Over the years, Bocoup has put a lot of open source work on the internet, and we’ve used a huge range of services to do so. In early 2014, it was possible to find our efforts hosted on Dreamhost, Media Temple, Linode, Github Pages, Rackspace, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Amazon, and more. Recently, […]

Last time, we looked at how using feature branches makes life easier, and how you would create a feature branch to make a change and push it up to GitHub for review in the form of a pull request. Now that a Pull Request is live, someone has to review it. Let’s walk through some […]

When it comes to learning Git, most folks I’ve talked to (myself included) have taken the slow and gentle path toward becoming proficient by adding it incrementally to their existing development processes. We begin by just running git init on an almost finished project and adding everything with a commit message such as start. Then, […]

One of the best parts about working at Bocoup is the freedom we have to explore ideas and open source projects. The diverse range of experience and interest we all bring to the table means there are always interesting open conversations taking place in the office; both about the implementation of specific ideas and the […]

Life on the cutting edge can be treacherous. At any moment, your web browser may dramatically update its user interface. Your e-reader might take your books away. Your favorite snack cake could disappear from store shelves. For many, the uncertainty of this lifestyle just isn’t worth it. Fortunately, when it comes to Node.js development, you […]

One of my favorite things about programming in node is the package management system. In almost all instances, the practice of locally installing modules for each project has simplified my life as a developer. However, as a long time contributor to Grunt, I have become intimately familiar with one edge case where this practice breaks […]

This post is the second in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built for PBS. You can read the introduction here. This guide assumes you have a production server up and running. If you need help getting there, check out the final post in the series for […]

This post is the first in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built with PBS. You can read more about the project in the series introduction here. Some Background We built the Map Center second-screen application in Node.js with the help of a number of open-source libraries. […]

This summer, Bocoup worked with Mozilla and PBS to build an open source, real-time web application for the 2012 US Presidential election. When we began, PBS (specifically, the folks at News Hour) had already completed a client-side application called “Map Center“. Map Center enabled users to view US demographic data and experiment with electoral college […]