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Anthony Colangelo

Meaning over Complexity

Posted on 5/22/14

Over the past few months, I set out to write regularly. I also had a few potential talk topics bouncing around my head, and I had been waiting to find the right place to share them. This past April, I spoke at two events: Jersey Shore Tech on design patterns in JavaScript and Peers Conf about how we built the system at the heart of the O Music Awards.
A Faster Horse

Posted on 10/10/13

On August 6, 1991, I was five months old. Also, Sir Tim Berners-Lee published the first web page ever. It was made up of plain HTML—no CSS, no JavaScript, no third-party plugins. Since then, the web has been filled with rapid invention and innovation.

The web has fundamentally changed since the days of HTML 4.01. The number of people with an internet connection has skyrocketed; recent estimates say that nearly 40% of the world’s population is now online. Bandwidth has also increased dramatically. Even cell phone connections are many times faster and more reliable than those original dial-up connections. Today, browsers are everywhere—phones, tablets, game consoles, televisions, watches, and soon, weird-looking glasses.
Under Pressure

Posted on 8/22/13

Deep in the middle of the night, illuminated by the glow of five screens full of graphs, data, code, and live video, I sat on edge, as I monitored a small army of servers. The O Music Awards, a 24-hour, live-streamed music and awards festival in New York City, was in full swing.

Sometime after 3am, I saw the first warning sign of a major issue—a slight uptick in an otherwise-flat graph. Over the next few seconds, it grew to a huge spike, and I alerted the team that we had a problem. Thanks to some well-configured caching, the homepage and live streams were unaffected, which meant a large majority of users didn’t even know we were having an issue. But, the failures were going to cause errors during voting, and a few other pages on the site were going to crash. The situation wasn’t great, but the mission-critical things were still working properly.
Go Vertical

Posted on 3/21/13

Devices come in all shapes and sizes—from iPhones, to the massive Galaxy Note, to the tall-but-skinny Nexus 7, to 10-inch iPads, and massive, 30-inch displays.
One Small Step

Posted on 9/27/12

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. A few hours later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface—the first time humans set foot on another planetary body. The astronauts were explorers. Yet, if they did not share their experiences, their expedition would have provided no meaningful benefits to anyone but themselves. True exploration isn’t just going somewhere or doing something new; it is experiencing something new and communicating that back to those who care.

Anthony Colangelo
@acolangelo
Developer

Articles By:

Meaning over Complexity

A Faster Horse

Under Pressure

Go Vertical

One Small Step

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