Learning to K.I.S.S (part 2)
In the last post we discussed the importance of immutable objects in a code base and took a critical look at some common techniques for creating immutable objects. In this post we’ll be looking at...
View ArticleUnite11 – Exporting to Flash from Unity
Last week, four of the Mind Candy tech team ventured over to San Francisco for the Unite conference. One of the things I was most keen to learn about is the upcoming Flash export. On the Tuesday, we...
View ArticleFlash on the Beach 2011
Last month I went to Flash on the Beach in Brighton. It was the first time I’ve to this particular event and I really enjoyed a lot. For the few of you that don’t know, FOTB is an annual conference...
View ArticleNOSQL Exchange
This is a quick run through of the NOSQL exchange that Ciaran & I attended on Nov 2 at SkillsMatter, which featured 8 speakers and links to all talks are included. A lot of people were asking which...
View Article99 Bottles of JMeter on the wall
I’ve recently had to do some performance testing on a couple of our new web services. I know of a few handy open source tools available for this. Tsung, Grinder and JMeter spring to mind. I find that I...
View ArticleScala at Mind Candy
Reading some recent negative commentary about Scala with interest I felt like it would be good to share our experiences with Scala. The Good. Scala is an expressive language – It often results in a lot...
View ArticleTesting Unity’s Flash Export on a Large Project – Part 1
Over the last weekend, I’ve been hard at work trying to get an unannounced Mind Candy project (made in Unity) to export to Flash. I thought it would be useful to share some details from the experience...
View ArticleGoogle and HTML5 – Simplicity, Security and Speed
HTML5 HTML5 has been around for a while, but only since recent times however, has it emerged as the major web technology of choice moving forward. Browsers are catching up, increasingly adding HTML5...
View ArticleMigrating a Play 1.2 website to Play 2.0
At Mind Candy there are a number of internal websites used for reporting and communication. For example – reading automated build/test status via some REST APIs and turning this into a nice visual...
View ArticleUsing giter8 to build Scala REST projects with Unfiltered, Netty and Gatling...
At Mind Candy we have a number of different Scala REST services to provide common aspects to our games, for example authentication and moderation. A standard we have developed is to use an Unfiltered...
View ArticleWorking from home in AWS (with access to everything)
Ever since we started moving parts of our services into EC2, we’ve been faced with a growing problem. It’s important that our team can access nodes directly in a troubleshooting situation, even at 3am...
View ArticleEvent Processing at Mind Candy
At Mind Candy we want to build great games that are fun and that captivate our audience. We gather a great deal of data from all of our products and analyse it to determine how our players interact...
View ArticleA Puppet module for Dynamic DynamoDB
As my colleagues have said in other posts, we make an extensive use of Amazon Web Services at Mind Candy. Recently we decided to use the AWS NoSQL offering DynamoDB for a specific use case in one of...
View ArticleFlash on the Beach 2011
Last month I went to Flash on the Beach in Brighton. It was the first time I’ve to this particular event and I really enjoyed a lot. For the few of you that don’t know, FOTB is an annual conference...
View ArticleTesting with Amazon SQS
We all know how great Amazon SQS is, and here at Mind Candy we use it extensively in our projects. Quite recently, we started making some changes to our Data Pipeline in order to speed up our Event...
View ArticleReaderT 101
This blog post is about dependency injection (d.i.) using the Reader monad in Scala. I won’t explain what a monad is nor will I explore any category theory (mostly because I don’t know how to explain...
View ArticleUtilising AWS Lambda to migrate 25,000,000+ images S3 bucket
When AWS announced AWS Lambda at last year’s re:Invent, we were really excited about it here at Mind Candy. The concept of a zero-administration compute platform, that is very scalable, cheap and so...
View ArticleA lazy adventure in Haskell
We’re seeing more and more Haskell pop up around Mind Candy. Time to get more familiar with it. Haskell has non-strict semantics, which in practice means a lot of Haskell is lazily evaluated (it’s not...
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