Blog

Over the last ten years, the servers that power jQuery and its associated projects have evolved from a single shared webhost to a complex fleet of more than thirty virtual machines. Recently, I have been working with the jQuery Foundation to reel in this decade of organic growth by standardizing the configuration management of our […]

Education and learning have always been a core part of what we do at Bocoup. From our earliest days in Fort Point, we’ve held classes dedicated to teaching people to build on the Open Web, the subjects evolving along with the platform itself. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on a new format […]

Illustration by Christine An Over the years, Bocoup has put a lot of open source work on the internet, and we’ve used a huge range of services to do so. In early 2014, it was possible to find our efforts hosted on Dreamhost, Media Temple, Linode, Github Pages, Rackspace, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Amazon, and more. Recently, […]

One of the best parts about working at Bocoup is the freedom we have to explore ideas and open source projects. The diverse range of experience and interest we all bring to the table means there are always interesting open conversations taking place in the office; both about the implementation of specific ideas and the […]

One of my favorite things about programming in node is the package management system. In almost all instances, the practice of locally installing modules for each project has simplified my life as a developer. However, as a long time contributor to Grunt, I have become intimately familiar with one edge case where this practice breaks […]

This summer, Bocoup worked with Mozilla and PBS to build an open source, real-time web application for the 2012 US Presidential election. When we began, PBS (specifically, the folks at News Hour) had already completed a client-side application called “Map Center“. Map Center enabled users to view US demographic data and experiment with electoral college […]

While executing the all too familiar morning routine of a geek today – coffee, various news feeds, and mailing lists – I came across a disturbing bit of news. It turns out that DigiNotar, an SSL certificate issuer in the Netherlands (think VeriSign but less reputable), issued a wildcard SSL certificate for Google domains (*.google.com) […]

If you’re upgrading server software, or changing your port config, you may accidentally Funk your Wagnalls. You’ll know the error when you try to restart apache. ~: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start * Starting web server apache2 (98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:8080 no listening sockets available, shutting down Unable to open […]

Today I came across that annoying situation where you build something that throws an error, but the build process spits out so much text to your terminal, that the error is lost. The terminal can only hold so-much text in memory. So what to do? Record the terminal output to a text file: ls> output.txt […]

After a recent foreign top level domain registration binge aimed at some fun domain hacks, I got sick of spending money on foreign  TLDs, and started getting creative with subdomain hacks. TLD hacks are fun, but feel a little less natural to me, and certainly don’t tend to read as well; my eyes tend to stop at […]