troika

I go to a lot of small power/symphonic metal concerts in Berlin, usually 100-200 people, small venue, 3 bands, 30-50 Euro entry, 5 Euro beer. Everything is so direct. The band is right in front of you - and quite often the earlier bands stand with you in the audience for the later ones. Very few people hold up their phones. It's one of the most retro experiences of people being present and in the moment.

If I compare that with the hoops my wife had to jump through to go to Taylor Swifts Eras tour - the fanclub joining, the late night ticket queues, the hefty price tag - all to sit in the back of a massive stadium with poor sound, observing a tiny dot in the distance that might or might not be Taylor swift I couldn't be more happy with my choice of genre.

Early in my career, I wrote sales funnel optimization algorithms for online-shops and travel websites. We've used an evolutionary algorithm approach - basically, a number of algos implementing competing strategies and aspects that could mutate, crossover, reproduce and die.

We ran this over two years and saw impressive results - especially for the time. I feel, this very much was a "thinking system" in the same sense. And I concur - there are many architectures and approaches to built this sort of thing.

Absolutely, of course. We've just launched and there are a number of features missing

Thanks, very interesting article and great explanations based on examples. Very exciting space!

Thanks :-) - should be fixed now.

I've switched to https://deepstream.io for my projects. It's just the realtime aspect of meteor, but in an entirely different league when it comes to performance

Great update, congratulations. It sounds similar to https://deepstream.io records - small JSON documents that are stored and synced in realtime across clients and can be arranged in lists and reference each other.

You could cut down costs or at least improve cost-predictability by hosting something like https://deepstream.io/ instead of Firebase. The problem however is that you are still exposed to your cloud provider's fees - if AWS or Google Cloud up their band-with cost, you're in the same boat. Than again, the independence gained by running a server in a basement comes with a very hefty penalty.

BERLIN ONSITE FULLTIME

We are looking for a skilled and motivated Junior Fullstack Developer to work on both the deepstream.io open source server and our upcoming realtime data platform deepstreamHub.com (on-site/fulltime in Berlin).

Please find more information here

https://deepstreamhub.com/careers/junior-developer/

Probably worth emphasizing that deepstream is a superset of socket.io in terms of features and has to do message permissioning etc. As well

Very true. I guess there's also the angle of alleviating third party risks if you're running a PaaS/IaaS offering. By open sourcing your core you give clients something to fall back upon if your company gets bought/goes bust etc. This might result in a competitive advantage over proprietary only competitors.

true, but Amazon's own messaging / pub sub services, e.g. SNS or SQS go for 50 cents/million or 2000 for four billion - not really a fair comparison of course as they do something quite different.

Yup, but we've build this trading app https://vimeo.com/143728632 using just deepstream - it does get you quite far

Overview of open source alternatives: https://deepstream.io/blog/realtime-framework-overview/

Both the deepstream.io server

https://github.com/deepstreamIO/deepstream.io

And node client

https://github.com/deepstreamIO/deepstream.io-client-js

are examples for a very clean, "no nonsense" style of writing JavaScript