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In this first post, of a series on Ruby's EventMachine, I will introduce EventMachine and explain why event-based programming is good for your wallet. EventMachine, which just turned 1.0.0 this week, is more than just a gem, it is a new paradigm for many Ruby programmers and is not always easy to just drop into your existing stack. As the name suggests, it gives you event-based programming.

Remember, Startup Weekend equates to about 21 hours of development time and that includes brainstorming, planning, talking to mentors, other meetings, eating and a bit of fun. Also, skill-sets between developers do not always line up. The key phrase is “ship it!” whether it is good, bad, ugly or broken. The clock is ticking.

In this blog post I'll go through an example, in repeatable steps, of how to get up and running with the Tornado chat demo on ActiveState's public sandbox for Stackato. ActiveState's Stackato PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) is based on VMware's open-source PaaS, Cloud Foundry, and offers an enterprise PaaS solution that will run on any public cloud, private cloud, laptop or desktop.

Geohashing is a simple way to encode latitude and longitude and grouping nearby points on the globe with varying resolutions. It was created by Gustavo Niemeyer. This blog post looks at how it's implemented any why it is such an elegant solution for encoding and managing location-based data.

In this post I will look at the technology infrastructure behind Summify.com, a website that strives to make our lives easier and helps us deal with the information overload we all experience every time we sit down at our computers. Summify has aggregated over 200 million stories from the web and serves them up on-demand through a series of different mediums. The website uses Tornado to push real-time updates out to the users and they have developed over a dozen backend systems, some of which I will cover in this blog post.