I think it would be a great idea for cost, but is not comparable to a properly-trained animal in most scenarios. My mother is blind and also has a cochlear implant (basically is just shy of being deaf) and has had a service dog for the last 7 years. The dog was in training for 18 months specifically to aid blind and deaf (combo) people, then my mother had to fly out East from Minnesota for 6 weeks just to train with it without the distractions of home. Her program was solid and both of the owner and dog know their roles very well. It would be extremely tough and cost prohibitive to do this without a track record and support structure behind the whole process.
Hey! I'm John and I'm a full-stack generalist web developer. Freelance for the last 12 years. I split my time about 75/25 between direct-to-client web software projects and CMS-driven website projects (Craft CMS, Expression Engine, custom PHP CMS, etc). Experience in jQuery, Backbone, React (React Native too) for front-end stuff - PHP, MySQL, Mongo, Elastic, etc for backend. My main focuses over the past few years have been medical software projects and audio management software.
PTRx.org - a web-based video delivery system for orthopedic providers to assign video prescriptions to their patients during recovery. Built an integration with Twilio's video and text chat aimed at HIPAA-compliant communication between providers and their patients. Backend built using CodeIgniter, Elastic, some API work with Zencoder and AWS.
The audio focused projects are all internal-network apps for commercial audio studio clients. They let commercial audio studios make their library of licensed tracks available for ad agencies, video production companies etc. Various workflows built out for billing, licensing, previewing tracks, etc. I'd be happy to show people around, but they're not publicly viewable. I currently have 3 clients using similar systems including 1 major "extreme sports" brand.
Facebook wouldn't likely exist if it wasn't for PHP. Zuck wrote something quickly in what he knew. They were able to deploy quickly, scale quickly, etc. Internally, they likely had the hope to migrate off of it at some point, but the business goals trumped the tech stack. From an outsiders point of view, no one cares about the tech problems they face with their tech stack.
VW is not in the same situation in the U.S. though. They have a lot of competition (they're not even in the top 10), so if they didn't do it in the the EU, but cheated on the U.S. models, there would be vastly differing output levels, signaling a discrepancy between the two models.
I do love that John's blog doesn't actually use jQuery itself (likely because it's not needed in this instance). Or any javascript for that matter, other than analytics...
Well, at linode you can't have a structure that is immune to failover, as they have single points of failure within their infrastructure, apart from anything else - all their London kit for instance lives in Telehouse East, in a few adjacent racks.
Once we'd done the initial up sticks and move to AWS, our first priority was to use their redundancy and failover to the fullest (six months of sleepless nights due to linode made this rather front and foremost in our minds) - so nothing that's happened at AWS has ever been anything more than an inconvenience - we've managed five nines since the move - before, we managed one.
Only one 9? Even through this crap during the holidays I've managed 3 9's on my service hosted on several servers in Linode Dallas (the most hard-hit region in this DDoS attack). I would have moved to AWS by now if Linode didn't have such cheaper bandwidth.
Yeah... our issues mostly arose from the fact that at the time, they were advertising 1Gbps node interconnect - which actually turned out to be 1Gbps HOST interconnect, with the nodes actually throttled down to 50Mbps. We use memcached extensively, and this was absolutely crippling for performance. It didn't help that they furiously denied that they were throttling until we demonstrated it beyond all doubt.
They did obligingly increase these caps when we begged them to do so, but at that point the writing was on the wall, and we kept on bumping into other weird and wonderful limitations and issues, such as the fact that someone running an intense job on the same host could bring our VPS's to an absolute crawl.
It really is a shame, as we desperately wanted to make it work, as we liked Chris's hands on approach (very much like ours), but ultimately our confidence in them was so eroded by the point that things started going genuinely wrong on their end that we had no choice but to leave.
As I said, we kept random small single-server stuff (wordpress sites mostly) there, as if you're not dealing with their networking, performance is generally OK - but the network limitations were an absolute clincher for us, and it was at one point literally every day that we'd find that one of their switches had broken, or we couldn't ARP IP's for no apparent reason, etc. etc.
ATL was much worse than Dallas in this go around. You did not get 3 9s in the last month if your service was located solely in ATL. They were completely null routed for the majority of 2 days.
Strange how this works. I moved everything to cloud providers because of availability issues. Now a few years later, I'm moving everything back to dedicated hardware in several different datacenters because of availability issues. Thanks, Docker!! <3
We are leasing hardware, and we are leasing a lot of OVH (in addition to a number of smaller providers). OVH does a good job, and if you build your infrastructure to load-balance around failure (which does not happen often), you'll hardly notice it. Often we get an email from OVH telling us that support techs have been automatically dispatched to a node which we hadn't even alerted about yet. Docker is basically a miracle drug for this kind of thing. Our hardware costs are less than half of what they were with EC2. Huge savings.
WebRTC is a huge one that comes to mind. With the App Store and Facetime in the same wheelhouse, there's no compelling reason to develop this area for Apple. It would be a HUGE win for the general web if they did, but there's zero reason for them to pursue it.
