I haven’t posted in a while. I know. Its been quite an exhaustive past few months, but I’m still alive and kicking. I’ll post a very short summary of what I’ve been up to since March.
Social Game Universe and the Lightning Platform are now powering a live CBC TV show called Over the Rainbow. Over the Rainbow is a production which asks the audience to pick their favorite Dorothy. During the show, viewers get to follow along with their computer or mobile device, interact with the TV show and vote at the end of the episode. On the 8th episode, one Dorothy will be cast to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of the Wizard of Oz. This project was a true test to Lightning’s scalability and prowlness, achieving higher amounts of users per minute than we’ve achieved with Dirty Dancing, running on less servers. The average API call executed in 30ms (0.003 seconds) which really isn’t too shabby when you are seeing such a high number of users, a number I am hoping I can disclose in the near future!
During the build of Over the Rainbow, Social Game Universe has moved to a new location, 8 Waterloo Terr. Its a cozy little spot in an alley. Now rocking a more comfortable settings, including a pool table and beer fridge with a tab. We are hoping that this new office is a reboot for the company that will bring more togetherness and an atmosphere that will enable creativity. During this move, we’ve lost some wonderful people whom we will all truly miss, including myself.
Lightning has now partnered with VoltDB, that will bring Lightning scalabilty and functionality we’ve wished MySQL would have. While VoltDB has had its quirks when getting up and running, it really is a great product to use. I’ve written a blog post for them describing part of the process we’ve gone through while switching from MySQL to VoltDB. To be honest, it wasn’t all that painful, but it takes some getting used to. I’m looking to write a far more detailed post here on how we’ve accomplished certain things in VoltDB with some example code, for those interested.
More recently, I’ve also picked up 3D Design again. It all started with an idea a friend put in my head and has gone now to become something where I put in a few minutes or hours here and there. It has been over 3 years since I’ve even touched 3D design software, so I was pretty lost at first. But like riding a bike, you can always pick it back up. I’m planing a post dedicated to this as well in the upcoming days as I reach nearer to completion.
Last but not least, Lightning. There are some very big things coming to Lightning starting in November. Expecting the first public release of it to come out then. The details on that are still quite secret, but rather than spill all the beans, I’ll let you read up on some of the things we are up to with Lightning on Canada Media Fund’s (CMF) website (Please click the header to view the video), where Lightning is previewed as one of Canada’s Top Digital Productions and as you can imagine, that makes me quite proud. “These critically acclaimed projects are prime examples of the enduring creativity of Canadian media producers and position Canada’s innovation on the world stage”, said Catalina Briceno, Director of Industry and Market Trends.
Well, that is all for now. Watch out for a few posts over the next few days. These are mere intros to some of the posts I will be making.