One of the things I wanted to do this weekend was to figure out how to run a web.py app with nginx and uWSGI. It took me ages to figure it out, but I finally got a working setup. This post is mostly to document the few things that made the difference.

First thing to note is that I did this all on a micro instance of Ubuntu 11.04 on EC2 (ami-1aad5273). Second, I installed the lastest versions of nginx and uWSGI from source. The following gist lists examples of the files I used to get this running. I should note that the config and .sh files are intended for running one server and one web.py application.

I gave Spring Social a try a a few months ago when building a little prototype for a project at work. It made integrating with sites like Facebook and Twitter so ridiculously easy. For whatever reason I was expecting a lot of headaches so I was pleasantly surprised. So much so that I was motivated to write an API binding for Instagram. It was a good way to cut my teeth as their API isn't too complicated. Nearly all API endpoints are covered aside from some sort of implementation against their real-time API. Also, it's not officially released by SpringSource so you won't find it in any of their repositories or the central Maven repo. Check out the tiny example project to get started with it. Or better yet, fork it and contribute.

To my surprise, @poornerd was actually using it in a project of his. Check out the hist test/beta. His project also intends to use Foursquare so I decided to have a go at writing another API binding for Foursquare. The Foursquare API is much more complicated than Instagram, and there are some oddities with how their objects are serialized to JSON. Thus, some of the object names are a little odd but I'm hoping to get some feedback from the community on that.  Aside from that, all major endpoints are implemented aside from the "multi" API which lets you  make more than one call with one HTTP request. I also setup an example project for Foursquare as well.

It's been fun contributing to an open source community and hopefully at some point they'll be officially released through SpringSource. Some feedback and/or criticisms would be greatly appreciated about either project so please go check them out if you have a moment and leave your comments here.

Over the past summer and fall I had been working on a large project for a client that I, unfortunately, can't mention. I may not ever be able to mention it. The project itself was pretty cool. It was a product configuration application. The front end was built with Flash using Robotlegs as the core architecture. On the backend there was two systems. The application model was tied in with Magento and all data was accessed using AMF. I didn't build or maintain that bit, but I had the pleasure of working with Adil Hashem on that piece.

The other backend system was a Java image compositor. The image compositor already existed but it needed a different implementation for the application to scale. With the image compositor being written in Java I took the opportunity to get into Java web development. I spent a good couple of weeks getting into Spring Framework and its Web MVC component. I also started exploring usage of MongoDB for basic statistical tracking but in the end went with Amazon's SimpleDB for ease of use and to minimize future IT needs. The whole image compositor is hosted and supported with various Amazon web services including EC2, S3, and CloudFront. I also set up a pretty snazzy automated deployment process with Ant.

The product configuration application was just one part of a bigger project. My app was pretty much in order but a combination of problems from all sorts of sources caused the project to stagger and eventually the project abruptly ended. I wont go into anything beyond that because it doesn't really matter. I was certainly bummed out when I found out the project would never see the light of day. However, the positive side is that I learned a whole bunch of new stuff. I'm really stoked on Spring and MongoDB lately. I can whip up backend prototypes so quickly with those two pieces of software and Morphia which is a document mapper for Java.

After work for me stopped on that project I started getting into Android game development a bit. It was fun for a while but I eventually decided that I had been at Rokkan for long enough. Nearly 5 and a half years after I came to New York City to work for them I finally felt the need to move on. I interviewed at a bunch of places and I ended up taking a job at Syrup. Syrup is essentially a full blown advertising agency but they're quite small considering how much they do. They do broadcast, print, and digital. They brought me on as their CTO to help boost their digital offering. I'm working with some really creative people and its been awesome so far.

That's all for now. I'm hoping to get back into blogging a bit. I'm still trying to prototype ideas and I hope to share some of the things I run into along the way. Perhaps I'll write a post on Spring and MongoDB next. Who knows...until then, happy coding.

Here's a great example of a site that allows the user to create a custom composition by using a butt load of animated bitmap assets. I'm quite impressed, one of the most solid executions of this technique I've seen in a while. Not to mention Harry is a great little character to have as a host.