When creating an API that delivers data that is changing rapidly or where speed is very much of the essence a real-time component soon becomes a necessity. Traditional ‘request-response’ technologies where the client makes a request, hangs around for a response and then processes it adds a huge overhead both in terms of response time but also on resources spent on wasted requests polling for changes when there are none. Indeed Zapier, a service that connects together APIs, estimated that they could reduce load by 66x by implementing a real-time component and eliminating polling.

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We have a well tested and stable codebase so we don’t have too many errors in our production environment. However things change (including third party services) and when things eventually go wrong I want to know about them and quickly.

The traditional method of troubleshooting may be through scheduled testing, trawling through log files or worse yet waiting for the end consumer to notify of an issue. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be notified in real time as and when errors occur?

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This article was originally published via Tumblr.

Arriving a little bit late to the Bitcoin party I was intrigued by the mining process so thought I would give it a go on a lazy afternoon with help from this blog post. Rather than tie up my home PC or commit to long term hosted mining contracts I used Amazon Web Services to provision a suitable machine for a few cents an hour. Thanks to the availability of suitable Bitcoin miners on GitHub the process is remarkably simple to get up and running.

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