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This post is the second in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built for PBS. You can read the introduction here. This guide assumes you have a production server up and running. If you need help getting there, check out the final post in the series for […]

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Realtime Node.js App: Stress Testing Procedure

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• performance,
• server side,
• testing,
• web applications

This post is the first in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built with PBS. You can read more about the project in the series introduction here. Some Background We built the Map Center second-screen application in Node.js with the help of a number of open-source libraries. […]

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Realtime Node.js App: A Stress Testing Story

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• performance,
• server side,
• testing,
• web applications

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 […]

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Bocoup & PBS: Building and Scaling a Realtime Node.js Application

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

Introduction Flexbox is a new layout mode in CSS3 that is designed for the more sophisticated needs of the modern web. This article will describe the newly-stablized Flexbox syntax in technical detail. Browser support is going to grow quickly, so you’ll be ahead of the game when support is wide enough for Flexbox to be […]

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Dive into Flexbox

• Tagged in:
• design,
• tools and workflow

Many people are inspired by the fantastic data visualizations published on the Open Web every day, but the practice of creating these engaging pieces is often shrouded in mystery. The first OpenVis Conf — set for May 16-17 in Boston — aims to change that, with two days of talks focused entirely on the process […]

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Announcing: OpenVis Conf

• Tagged in:
• data visualization

Many of us here at Bocoup spend a lot of our time helping others get better at JavaScript and working with open web technologies, from Adam Sontag working with folks to solve their problems in the #jquery IRC channel, to Ben Alman working out the perfect way to explain an IIFE, to Greg Smith guiding […]

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Introducing Bocoup Screencasts

• Tagged in:
• training,
• tutorial

Our good friend, and my longtime collaborator, Pete Karl, is leaving Bocoup. Pete was employee number five at Bocoup and over the past two plus years we have learned so much from him. From his earliest days shipping KLOCs to clients, he immediately started molding Bocoup into a more efficient software company, eventually moving on […]

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Good Bye Pete

• Tagged in:
• news

Today we at the Miso Project are excited to release a new library, called Storyboard, our state management library for control flow of interactive interfaces. As more and more of our code is written in an asynchronous manner, managing the flow of our code becomes more challenging. Event broadcasting and subscriptions is a common pattern […]

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Building Your Control Flow with Miso.Storyboard

• Tagged in:
• data visualization,
• miso project,
• tools and workflow,
• tutorial

This post was written in collaboration with Alex Graul, Miso Project‘s co-creator. We are excited to release version 0.3.0 of Miso Dataset today that is full of new features. For the gory details, you can take a look at the closed issues, but this post will cover the major enhancements to the Dataset library. Miso […]

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Miso Dataset 0.3 Release

• Tagged in:
• data analysis,
• data visualization,
• miso project,
• open source

If you’re planning to catch the U.S. presidential debates tonight, you should have a second screen open and a browser pointed to ReConstitution 2012, a web application that we collaborated on with Sosolimited for The Creators Project. ReConstitution 2012 is a live deconstruction of the presidential debates. It scrapes the closed caption data from the […]

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ReConstitution 2012 – Live Debate Deconstruction and Visualization

• Tagged in:
• data analysis,
• data visualization,
• design