Over the next few weeks or months, as I search for my next role, I’m hoping that I’m going to have a few conversations. The purpose of this post is to clarify what I can bring to any company that is considering employing me and what I’m looking for in my next role. TL;DR / Exec Summary What I’ll bring: See my LinkedIn profile. In particular, my time at Nexmo (acquired by Vonage) and my more recent experience at Ably A successful servant leader and award-winning Developer Experience & ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The first version of this post was published on the PostHog blog on September 30, 2021 Developer Relations exists and is executed in different ways at almost every company. Our Developer Relations journey at PostHog has just begun, and we still don’t know exactly what it will look like in the medium term. But we can still assess what our needs are going to look like and formulate a plan to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations. This plan, at the very least, provides a level of clarity t...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Listen to the audio version on Descript 🔉 It’s been just over eight months since I left Nexmo/Vonage, where I’d been for over four years, and I’ll admit to having spent a few hours reflecting upon my decision to leave. It’s also that time of year when many people seem to get a new job and change companies so now seems like a good time to share some advice and some of my experiences. When frustrated or tired of a job the most obvious reaction for many is to look for another job at a...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In the first post in the series we covered discovering real-time data within your systems and applications. In part two we went through the use cases for your real-time data. In this final section we’ll cover the how: how to describe, publish & consume real-time data from your systems and expose the data so that you can build real-time features. The main steps we’re going to cover are doing the following with the real-time event data: Analyse/Process Describe Publish Consume and Use Analy...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
This is the first part of our real-time data series. The second part in the series covers use cases for your real-time data. In the Discovering Real-Time Data in Your Apps post I covered what is real-time and discovering the real-time data within your existing apps. In this second post I want to cover ways in which you can use the real-time data that you have now identified within your apps. Specifically, how you can use that data to understand what’s happening right now in your apps and ho...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Real-time notifications, data visualisation, communication, collaboration… Whether the aim is to improve user experience or to facilitate the management of your infrastructure, the ability to collect, process, and deliver data in real-time is critical. Every application has real-time data, but turning this data into useful functionality requires three steps: Identify the points within a system where it can be found. Know how to make it accessible to other systems and applications. Understan...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
This was originally written by me and published on the Pusher blog What is Real-Time? – it’s a question that is asked a lot. It’s a fundamental question that I’m sure many are curious to get a definition for. And many a developer that’s worked with embedded systems may have even been annoyed when they hear “real-time” in the context of the Web or the Internet applications. So, to clarify things once and for all let’s address the question of “What is Real-Time?” and apply i...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
When I tweeted my availability back on January 8th 2016 I wasn’t sure if it would have any reach. But thanks to an amazing network of peers, and a popular post on Defining Developer Relations, I’ve ended up having lots of conversations with very smart people about potential opportunities. As I reflected on the past year, and discussed developer relations with others, it became very clear that I had some criteria for my next role: Key stakeholder in shaping the developer relations strategy...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The number of companies looking to build developer relations teams is on the increase. But what developer relations means to each company tends to differ; some hire advocates and some hire evangelists, some are looking to market to developers and others see devrel as key to capturing feedback and to the success of their product. How do you know the roles and activities that will work best for your company? What’s the difference between these job titles? What developer relations should mean ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
There are lots of real-time frameworks which exist to allow us to build real-time features and functionality into our apps. However, I often see developers who are excited about discovering real-time framework X and then proclaim “now to find a use for it”. Every single application has real-time data and every single application could benefit from real-time features driven by that data. So I felt compelled to write a series of posts covering some of the fundamentals of real-time. This is ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
So, you want a real-time API. Where do you start? You’re convinced of the benefits of a real-time API and know what data you want to make available through it. But you’ve probably got a number of questions playing on your mind: What method do I use to expose the data? Do I increase the allowed polling interval of my REST API? (Please don’t) or offer HTTP Long-Polling, HTTP Streaming and/or WebSocket API endpoints? Or should I offer WebHooks? What format should my data be in? Are there a...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I like retrospective-style posts. When writing them I get to look back at the things I’ve done and am often surprised, pleased and encouraged to improve. I also enjoy reading retrospective posts of others, particularly from those who are doing similar things or those that I look up to and learn from. Hopefully the majority will forgive the indulgence of a personal retrospective and a few - like me - will find it interesting and useful. If you’re considering a developer evangelist role thi...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Back in February 2014 I wrote a list of 10 predictions for realtime web technologies in 2014 (well, it was 10 and 2 bonus items). In this blog post - sorry it’s not 1 year on - I’ll review those predictions and provide my thoughts on whether they were correct or not. Here’s how I feel I did with the 10 predictions: 5 Correct ✔ 3 Partially correct ¯\(ツ)/¯ There’s evidence to suggest trends towards 3 of the predictions so I’m only going to say I was partially correct with those....| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Many tout WebSocket as a long awaited transport technology for realtime communication on the web. For many years developers have hacked around with HTTP to try and achieve “realtime push” (a.k.a. server push), where the server “pushes” data to the client. WebSocket was the solution that was born out of the requirement to provide a standardised solution to replace the hacks. But some solutions are still using HTTP transports such as Polling, Long-Polling and Streaming. So has WebSocket...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The callback has been invoked, the Promise☀ fulfilled. I’m super-excited to be rejoining Pusher to head up evangelism and developer experience. This leaves a BladeRunnerJS Developer Evangelist role vacant so please get in touch if you’re interested. ☀ This is a play on words. Rejoining wasn’t planned. Rejoining Pusher When I left Pusher back in June 2013 I said it was the best job I’d ever had. I’ve enjoyed my time back at Caplin, but I’d still say that the most enjoyment and ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
It’s interesting how I used to always talk about the Real-time Web and Real-time Web Apps but now it really does need to be Real-time Internet Apps because IoT (The Internet of Things) now means we need to think beyond what we would traditionally class as Internet technologies. In this latest talk I cover realtime web technology communication paradigms and use cases for 2014 and beyond. I also talk through the technology stack we have to build upon when trying to be innovative and that the ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
For completeness the article is now available in full below and will be updated over time. The State of the Componentised Web blog post is now available on the Future Insights blog. If you’re interested in attending FOWA London you can use the coupon code “BRJSFOWA15″ when signing up. --- Introduction The idea of building applications out of a number of independent components isn’t anything new. But with Web Components on the horizon I thought it would be a good time to look at compon...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Nearly two months in, I thought I'd publish 10 realtime web technology predictions for 2014 based on how it developed in 2013 and the trends I've seen so far this year. I've added two additional bonus predictions for good measure. Note: I came up with most of this list at the start of the year. I've only just got around to expanding upon the details now. Before I go into the predictions: if you're interested in realtime technologies then you may be interested in the Realtime APIs panel that I...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I recently did a short interview with Future Insights. As part of that my talk from FOWA 2013 was published. Future Insights stopped operating so content for their accounts, including their YouTube, has been lost forever :( So, if this interests you, you’ll need to read the blog posts. I've also written up my talk in three parts: Part 1: Background, Benefits & Use Cases of Realtime Part 2: Fundamentals of the Realtime Web & Realtime Web Functionality Part 3: Choosing your Realtime Web App T...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In the previous parts of this three part series I covered: Part 1: History, Background, Benefits & Use Cases of Realtime Part 2: Fundamentals of the Realtime Web & Realtime Web Functionality. The FOWA 2013 Choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack video On to part three... In this final part (sorry for the delay) I'm going to cover how you should approach choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack. Socket.IO has done an amazing job when it comes to making people aware of realtime web technolog...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In part 1 of this 3-part write-up from my talk at FOWA London 2013 I covered the History, Background, Benefits & Use Cases of Realtime. In this 2nd part I'm going to provide details on some fundaments about realtime web technology and an overview of the basic types of functionality that they offer. Part 1: History, Background, Benefits & Use Cases of Realtime Part 3: Choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack The FOWA 2013 Choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack video What are the core conce...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
This is part 1 of a 3 part series on Choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack. It's based on the talk I recently gave at the Future of Web Apps. Part 2: Fundamentals of the Realtime Web & Realtime Web Functionality Part 3: Choosing your Realtime Web App Tech Stack For some time I've seen FOWA as one of the biggest web conferences around. So, when Future Insights approached me to talk at FOWA 2013 I was very excited (and nervous). Now that the event has been and gone I'm pleased to say that b...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I quite frequently see posts on StackOverflow about how to add realtime functionality to a PHP application, or to build a realtime solution with PHP. And I'm increasingly getting emails asking the same. So, here's what I feel the current state of Realtime Web Technology is for PHP: The solutions for PHP alone are very limited. There is a framework called ReactPHP on top of which Chris Boden has built Ratchet. I've also come across something called WaterSpout Server which claims to offer WebSo...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
On Monday we published our first BladeRunnerJS (BRJS) blog post. It provides an overview of what BRJS is, why it was created and why it's being open sourced. We saw a nice spike in traffic and I was thinking about ways I could try to sustain that. I decided not to take any action (e.g. submit for consideration in JavaScript Weekly) for two reasons; we'd publish plenty more posts over the coming weeks and we don't have any source in github right now. It would therefore be much better to focus ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Over the past three weeks I've had the opportunity to investigate modern web development tools and I feel a little bit like a kid in a sweet shop. Firstly, I'm excited to be here. Secondly, there's so much to choose from. In the past you may have been able to pick up a selection box containing a few pre-defined dev tool options. Now, there are so many technologies and tools available it's like being in the pic 'n' mix section. source There are so many tools to choose from when undertaking a w...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Around 3 months ago I made the very difficult decision to leave Pusher. After just over 2 years I'm leaving behind what - up until now - has been the best job I've ever had. In this post I'll cover what's been achieved while I've been at Pusher, why I left and what I'm going to be doing next. Achievements Over the past 2 years Pusher has achieved a lot and I believe I've made a good contribution towards that. But, here I'm focusing on what I've done in my role as Developer Evangelist for Push...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Feature image by Sean Loyless I've been to quite a few conferences over the last couple of years (46 conferences and events, by my count). Converge Conference was something different. Although a tech conference, the focus in the talks I saw was most definitely on soft skills and experiences, and not really on the tech. This was highly refreshing. There were 3 talks in particular that resonated with me. All of a sudden ... no luck! by Rachel Andrew - more information below. Enterprise Porridge...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Inspired by the first two talks at #stacked13 by Mike Taulty and then Maarten Balliauw I thought I'd jump straight into Windows Azure Mobile Services and build an a realtime collaborative synchronised todo list. I'd do this based on the Get started with data in Mobile Services HTML guide. I would then and host it on a Windows Azure web site. Update: Sorry, I haven't renewed my Azure Mobile Services account so the demo is no longer available View the demo Note: I want to publish this quite qui...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
First I'd like to emphasise that this is a blog post on how and not why. The why comes down to the judges. So, thanks Judges! Secondly I'd like to thank Rob Dunfey for the idea and for providing additional motivation - I'll dig deeper into this later. Finally: what am I going to cover? As the title suggests, I want to cover the how. What that means is: The Idea Solving a Real Problem The Motivation A Developer's Toolbox? My Developer's Toolbox - How the Realtime Collaborative Mapping app was ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
For a long while now I've not been getting as much out of Twitter as I used to. There's too much information to take in. I've long said that Twitter is throw-away. If you miss something then it doesn't matter. If it's important then I'll see a retweet or pick up the information from somewhere else. This is wrong. Just because it's not being retweeted by everybody it doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile update. Just because it doesn't get upvoted on Hacker News it doesn't mean that it's not rele...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I'm on the "What Developers Want" panel at the Business of APIs Conference London, arranged by Mashery. I'm also giving a lightening talk on my take on "What Developers Want". Video streaming by Ustream Unsurprisingly I believe they wany the APIs to offer access to their data in Realtime. Here are the details: What Makes An API Awesome? We now have a better idea than ever before what is required to offer an awesome API. Our developer portals speak to developers, making it clear what our API o...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
A couple of days after the WebSockets panel at HTML5DevConf in San Francisco I gave a talk at TwilioCon. We were asked to try and cover a big topic and focus on a few key points. Since the conference was for Twilio, a telephony cloud service, we wanted to cover something that both incorporated Twilio and realtime web technologies such as Pusher. The topic we therefore decided to cover was How the Realtime Web is Influencing the Future of Communications. The themes that the talk would cover wa...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
On October 16th 2012 I sat on a HTML5DevConf WebSocket panel along with Ilya Grigorik from Google, Matt DeBergalis from Meteor and Peter Moskovits from Kaazing - the panel was chaired by Frank Greco, also of Kaazing. Here are the notes, in a pretty raw format, from the event. A more curated write-up can be found on the Pusher blog. Where does WS affect current web infrastructure the most? The potential for many more persistent connection to be held open. As apps move away from polling this is...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
It's too broad a statement to say that absolutely everybody is your customer. But, you actually never know if the next person you speak to could be a potential customer so you should treat them that way. Treat them the way you would want to be treated no matter the roles you are currently in. Let me explain. The Thank You Economy I'm recently back from a holiday and during that time I picked up the Thank You Ecomony by Gary Vaynerchuk again - I'd read a number of chapters but never got around...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I can't believe it! I left University to take my first job 11 years ago. During that time I've worked in finance, e-learning, GIS and SEO/digital marketing. Although I've had some interest in these sectors my real interest was just the technology, with a passion for realtime web technologies. I now work for Pusher and can focus almost entirely on realtime web technologies and the application of them. Whilst I'm truly lucky to be able to work day-in day-out on something I'm passionate about, i...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
A couple of weeks ago I attended HackLDN for the 2nd time. The focus of the event is very much to create something with real business potential. I completely understand the reasoning behind that and back the idea. But, if everybody had an idea and everybody wanted to work on their own project, to create a company, then there would be a lot of one-man/woman teams. We need people to go along to have fun and experiment with technologies. These types of people are as important as the 'entrepreneu...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I'm attending Hackathon London this weekend. Normally I help each team at the event but don't get too involved in individual projects. This time things might be different. In 2006 David Beckham was dropped from the England squad by Steve McClaren. This wasn't a footballing decision, it was to try and stamp his authority on the team and show he was his own man. It massively backfired. I saw this an an opportunity and created Bring Back Beckham. I created the site in a night and after 4 days it...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In my recent talks I always give realtime collaborative code editing as a great example of collaboration. As far as I know Cloud9 are the first to add this features to an online IDE (I've heard such a feature has been available in desktop IDEs for a while). They use socket.io for their solution, which isn't a surprise since they're big on node.js. The recent mail-out must have really driven some traffic they're way as they've reported: We are experiencing the highest demand in our history. If...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I recently gave a my Realtime Web Apps in the Wild talk at Fluent Conference in San Francisco. It's a pretty big event with some impressive and well-informed speakers, so it was great to be part of. Slides: You can find the slides from the talk in the mode which controls the second screen application here: The slides also contain links to the demo videos for the appropriate slides, identified by this image: Remember to check out the cool Ghosts demo. If you are interested in this realtime tec...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I've just finished giving my presentation on HTML Web Apps in the wild at HTML5DevConf. The Wifi stood up so hopefully the second screen experience really helped to demonstrate how realtime web technologies, and of course Pusher can be used to enhanced interaction and engagement within applications. You can find the slides, 2nd screen app and the slides in "controller mode" via: https://www.leggetter.co.uk/pres/html5devconf/| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I can't believe it, but I've now been working for Pusher for a year. It's been an exciting year both in life and in business - and it's great when you spend a lot of the time working on something you are really interested in. So, I thought I'd push out a post covering the things that I've done this year along with a few thoughts. A Developer Evangelist? I'm a strong believer that we are much more than a job title and that each person has their own strengths, weaknesses and interests so they s...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Really pleased to see my realtime commenting system blog post appearing on Smashing Magazine. The post took a reasonable amount of time to write but I really like the way that the application is built from near-scratch and is progressively enhanced, first with AJAX and then realtime web functionality. Big thanks to Bryce Wilson of zendit.com for putting the HTML5, WebSockets (connectivity) and Pusher image together.</a></p> You can read the "How To Build A Real-Time Commenting System" post on...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Update My opinion, indicated in the comments below, is now: Comet is an umbrella term for all the old HTTP-based hacks and is a phrase we want to get rid of. WebSockets are where we want to be; browsers and beyond. Below is the old post covering my original opinion: --- "WebSockets or Comet" I’ve been thinking about writing about this frequently used statement for a while, and I’ve seen a few comments and discussions previously about this e.g. from Martin Tyler of Caplin Systems and Peter...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Over the weekend I attended the Code Africa hack weekend which was organised and hosted by The Times. The event saw developers, designers, journalists and entrepreneurs come together to try and form ideas and build prototypes over one weekend. My main takeaways from the event were a much better understanding of the state of technology in Africa, how technology can be used to help the people living within the continent and how realtime technologies can be used not only to improve application f...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I started writing this right after the jQuery UK event but have only just found time to finish it off sitting in Stansted airport at 7am. jQuery is a funny thing; it's made JavaScript coding easy for advanced developers and accessible to web designers, and you could even say that the web designer role has very much changed because of it. It's made web interfaces much richer and interactive. But, it's also made us lazy because it's so easy to use. It's time to take a step back and start thinki...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Realtime location tracking Poll (I'm sure they'll introduce WebHooks soon) the Vodafone API and push realtime updates to a map. A better Betfair Ok, you probably won't be able to build an app that's better than betfair. But using our API in conjunction with Betfair you'll be able to build a realtime betting system. The questions is: can you get realtime data from Betfair? Things like realtime odds? Multiplayer Hangman A simple turn-based game. Take the ideas that Dan from Pearson spoke about ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
When data is being delivered to web applications the chances are that you'll be displaying that data within the user interface (UI). In order to do this you need to find the element in the Document Object Model (DOM) and then update it. Whilst the performance of web browsers is improving all the time DOM manipulation can still be costly (use up time and resources) if you are pushing through a lot of data so it's worth keeping the interaction with the DOM to a minimum. You should also consider...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I gave a presentation yesterday at Edinburgh techmeetup. A big thanks to Dale Harvey for inviting me to talk and to all the attendees for taking the time to attend, listen and interact. Aaron Bassett also gave a good talk on Avoiding Integration Hell so I'd recommend you follow him for more info. Here's a direct link to the "Web Browsers & the Realtime Web the past, present & future" slides. And here's the recording of my talk (thanks to Marius Ciocanel): TechMeetup Talks - Phil @Leggetter on...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The real-time web started off by just being "cool"; a quirky and fun space to be in with lots of "cool" technology. People weren't sure whether it was just a fad, stimulated by hype. The value it delivers in the form of customer engagement, interaction, collaboration and the opportunities it can provide by being real-time is now much clearer, and consequently the benefits of using real-time technologies are beginning to be understood. Realtime Web Technology Accessibility One of the problems ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
A couple of hours ago I was on a on the 'The Right Place At The Right Time: How The Real-Time Web Influences The "local" World' panel at the Local Social Summit. The panel was organised and chaired by Sebastien Provencher and also included RyanMacJones, Dave Ambrose and Stefano Diemmi. Here's the information about the panel and my thoughts on the questions that were asked. Description The rise of the real-time Web is well documented. Propelled by both the social networking revolution and mobi...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I've just finished reading chapter 2 of Zoom! The faster way to make your business idea happen and to use one of Ian Sanders favourite words it really "resonated" with me and my experiences with Kwwika. Chapter 2 is entitled "The trouble with too much planning. How to unplan your business". I've been following Ian for probably around three years now and for around the last two he's been talking, tweeting, blogging and vlogging about unplanning your business. I had tried to unplan Kwwika. The ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I'm not answering this question directly in the post. I'd like people to ask questions and raise concerns in the comments and I'll then do my best to answer the questions and alleviate any concerns. I believe that WebSockets are ready for commercial use and I'll justify this stance in answering any questions. Look forward to hearing your questions and thoughts. View Q&A/Comments| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
With the arrival of WebSockets we finally have a standardised technology for true realtime bi-directional communication between a server and a web browser (or any other client). When we were creating our What are WebSockets? page we decided to write up a history of the technologies that came before and that are in some cases still in use today. How did we (developers) achieve realtime browser push before WebSockets and what were the downfalls of those technologies which meant they never reall...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Over the past 10 or so years I've written a lot of JavaScript. From very early on, at Caplin Systems, I had to write things in a way which ensured that code was clear, usable, discoverable, reusable, extensible and can easily built upon. One of the concepts that was used was to put code within a namespace. This ensured that you couldn't accidentally override a function in the global window namespace and also meant that the namespace would describe the sort of functionality contained within. I...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I value honesty, fairness and thoughtfulness above many other things. And I believe that the way I conduct myself reflects these values. I don't do this through any real thought process. It's driven by a physical feeling. It's difficult to explain, but I feel it in my chest. When I feel I've been treated unfairly I just have a sensation of unfairness, lack of care and thought. When I see others treated unfairly I have the same feeling. It annoys me, it makes me mad, and it adds to my drive to...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In our last ASP.NET post, The easiest way to add real-time functionality to an ASP.NET e-commerce application, I demonstrated how to add realtime stock level updates and notifications to an ASP.NET e-commerce application. In this post I'm going to show how to add a "Who's shopping?" widget to the same application. The purpose of this widget is to show other users that interest in the product they are viewing is high and that, in combination with the realtime stock levels, will encourage them ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
While adding realtime functionality to ASP.NET applications has often seemed difficult due to the connection limitations of the IIS platform, it can actually be achieved fairly easily by offloading this component to third party services like Pusher. In this series of posts, I'll get you started with this exciting technology through a number of hands-on tutorials. In the first one we'll build a simple e-commerce application that displays realtime stock levels to the customers. One of the probl...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I joined Pusher around over a month ago now and it's been a non-stop whirlwind of activity. On my first day I was in Poland at Falsy Values for a JavaScript conference and at the same time I was putting together an article for .net magazine. The article is now in the August edition (issue 217) and it got a massive 5 page spread (must be all the pictures). The article covers building a real-time survey using Ruby on Rails and Pusher. I also wrote about how Pusher can be used to progressively e...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
At the beginning of 2011 we reported that Collect had decided to drop it’s API in order to change their offering to something more profitable. But now ReadWriteWeb have reported the disappointing demise of Collecta. This has the potential of being the first big failure of a well funded real-time web focused company, so questions need to be asked about why this happened and why Collecta weren’t successful. Back in January of this year we asked “Is It Finally the End for Real-time Search...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I spent the majority of last week in Warsaw at Falsy Values where I attended a Games Workshop and a conference day. It was also my first week working as a Developer Evangelist working for Pusher. A big and exciting week all round. HTML5 Games Workshop The HTML5 games workshop was ran by @kuvos and @pornelski and we went through building a game of Tetris and then Mario. I was very impressed to see what can be achieved with Canvas and the workshop provided a lot of food for thought about the so...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
If you follow me on Twitter or if I've met up with you in the past few weeks you'll probably know, or have guessed the news. I'm leaving Kwwika, and have joined Pusher. Whilst it's disappointing to leave a project that I've spent the last one year and three months on behind, the move to Pusher couldn't have happened without it. My new role as Developer Evangelist at Pusher is the type of role that I've been trying to build for myself for a long time and it's fantastic that Max and Damien ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
PubSubHubbub has become the standard protocol for real-time RSS and Atom feed subscription and delivery. But not everybody wants to host their own PubSubHubbub hub in the same way that hardly anybody hosts their own website, and why cloud services in general have become so popular. Guzzle Ayup has entered the market to offer a hosted PubSubHubbub hub service. Since PubSubHubbub has been around for a while it’s relatively easy for a developer to start using a hub such as Guzzle Ayup (Ayup fo...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
A couple of nights ago I want to a Dundee Web Standards event. The events are organised by Chris Leckie and has been running since around October 2010. I've attended once before to see Chris Mills of Opera give a talk on HTML 5 so this was only my second time at a DWS event which is held once a month at Braes, Perth Road, Dundee. The Fleet Collective Most of us will have heard of TechHub (and variations) and have an idea about what it is; it's a place where you can rent a desk(s), use office ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
On Saturday I went to DDD Scotland for the first time and really enjoyed myself. Not only were there some really good talks on a range of subjects but the it was great to meet people I interact with on Twitter and make new connections. I managed my schedule for the day using a mobile app created for DDD Scotland by the recently formed Level Up. The DDD Scotland schedule covered a number of interesting topics and I decided to jump between the tracks to try and get a bit of everything. I starte...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I'm a .NET guy and I'm excited and interested in cutting edge technologies. I've found the lack of a .NET community (particularly in Scotland) and not seeing enough developers who primarily using Microsoft technologies getting involved with tech communities really frustrating . My feeling is that there aren't a lot of regular .NET events or general tech meetups involving .NET. This is for a number of reasons; bad feeling towards Microsoft, difficult access to Microsoft technologies due to co...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The number of “as a Service” types continues to grow and we are even seeing services that help you build your own service. PublishMyData falls into this category as it offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which enables you to offer your Data as a Service (DaaS). The company’s focus is to help those with data share it in a standard format and in an accessible way. PublishMyData’s website sums up its offering as: We can help you publish accessible, queryable, Linked Data on the Web...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
SXSW was the source of a flood of real-time information on the web. Information flowed from attendees using social media tools to share what was being discussed, their thoughts and their experiences. This information was amplified further by the information be re-shared (retweeted on Twitter) and by other opinions being expressed about all things SXSW. But how is it that you ensure you don’t miss an important piece of information from within your social media connections or even outside of ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I'm looking for a contractor for a provisional 3 month contract with the following skills, experience and interests: Essential C# jQuery TDD/BDD ASP.NET MVC ADO.NET Entity Framework or other ORM Great to have Passionate about the real-time web and real-time data (essential for the longer term) Knowledge of building scalable systems on Amazon Infrastructure Experience of integrating with 3rd party payment systems and building basic ecommerce functionality Experience of building a SaaS or IaaS ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Real-time and the real-time web continue to be a hot topic of conversation but is the term “real-time” getting used correctly? When we talk about real-time technology are we truly describing what the technology is delivering or is it being used and abused as just another marketing buzz word? Can we class any of the current technology solutions as truly real-time and can other solutions be defined in any other way? Is it too late to save “real-time” or will it forever be lost to market...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Cloud APIs are all about the endpoints: some services follow the current trend of providing a RESTful end point, others use older protocols such as RPC or SOAP, some use newer – push focused – endpoints like WebSockets or HTTP Streaming, others may offer a number of different endpoints to meet different requirements and some just use what seems to be best for a specific job which might mean not strictly following protocol rules. But is providing an endpoint to a service alone good enough?...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
During the past four months we’ve seen not one but two well known real-time search engines disappear. First there was OneRiot, which in October 2010 decided to focus on advertising. More recently, Collecta closed it’s real-time search engine and API to focus on alternative real-time products. Digging further into real-time search offerings you will also discover that crowdeye has also decided to pull its real-time search engine. This now appears to leave Topsy, a OneRiot partner, and of c...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I did my first ever TechMeetup talk yesterday in Aberdeen and my chosen subject, unsurprisingly, was The Real-Time Web. We started out discussing what real-time was, then what The Real-Time Web is and when receiving information in real-time mattered. I also went on to cover some of the key real-time web technologies including HTTP Streaming, PubSubHubbub and WebSockets and then on to real-time web services and platforms. A big thanks to @aboynejames for suggesting I do the talk and Bruce Scha...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
A core feature of the real-time web is the continuously updating real-time streams of information. These streams are commonly generated by social networks and with the continued uptake of social networking the amount of information is only going to increase. This will continue to introduce opportunities for companies to create products and services that extract value from that vast amount of data. Some of the most common services built around these streams include trend and sentiment analysis...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Brightwurks, who develop Feed My Inbox, have just posted a blog article explaining the Real-Time Delivery of blogs, feeds and news to an email inbox. The article discusses polling and real-time protocols. They list the Twitter API as a real-time protocol although they do know it's not actually an example of a real-time protocol and explain this later in the post. I've just posted a comment clarifying that although the Twitter API is not a real-time protocol it does use a real-time technology ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I've just posted a comment on a really good article by Kate Ho of Startup Cafe about her predictions on the rise of multi-user, multi-device table applications. Obviously my comments are focused really on the technology behind such a rise. Here's my comment in full, slightly edited to be a bit more readable as a blog post. Kate - another very insightful post. And another set of predictions that I completely agree with you about and really excite me because I'm working on technology that makes...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Delivery as a Service and Data as a Service (both DaaS) are definitely going to be big in 2011. Things really kicked off in 2010 with the emergence of companies focusing on real-time data delivery and mobile. We also started to see really exciting services focused on delivering real-time client push notifications to web browsers. I would put Kwwika in both of these categories. As 2011 continues we might to see some of these companies either partner up or start to tread on each others toes as...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
A lot of people have written up their thoughts on 2010. Whether the thoughts are personal or a look back at specific things such as real-time web products the purpose is the same; to reflect on what has happened during the year, an opportunity to realise what's been achieved, what hasn't, what could've been and how things can be learnt and bettered. So, six days into 2011 I'm writing this blog post. It's purpose is all of the above but it will hopefully also act as a reminder to me about why ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
There are a number of ways of delivering data in real-time but until recently it has looked like PubSubHubbub, with the backing of Google, was going to be the preferred method. However, the past couple of weeks have seen a couple of interesting developments which could indicate that the developer community may actually prefer HTTP Streaming. The emergence of the real-time web has seen an increase in the visibility of technologies that facilitate the delivery of data in real-time. Twitter was ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In a world where real-time data streams are becoming much more common, and with the volume of that data continuing to increase, it makes sense that a framework would be developed to increase the ease at which that data can be processed. Yahoo! S4 isn’t the first such framework to be concieved, or even open sourced, but it is likely to massively increase awareness that such frameworks exist, what problems they may help solve and get developers thinking about how they could use the technology...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I've just been involved in a twitter conversation with Nick Halstead of DataSift on Twitter. This all started when I tweeted that I thought Kwwika would be a great way of distributing data from DataSift to any web-enabled device. The conversation continued: The main thing here for me is Nick's point that "you just need a client-side library". This is an assumption that a lot of services make. Services tend to offer one or a number of server APIs; maybe a REST one and now luckily we are seeing...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Over the past couple of weeks we've been involved in developing a Real-Time Cricket widget. It's been a collaboration, with Opta Sports providing the data, Kwwika powering the real-time client push as well as doing a bit of dev on data architecture and feed parsing and Matador Digital helping us build the widget itself. There's quite a bit of work gone into this widget in a short space of time and I'm really pleased with the result. I'll go into exactly how it was built in more detail in a la...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
We've got a potential client interested in using Kwwika on HP webOS so we've been working with them to test the Kwwika JavaScript library on a platform that we've not been directly targeting. After a problem glitch with the 64bit webOS SDK (mainly JVM and PATH problems) we got the 32bit one up and running and the a webOS emulator fired up. From there Palm have created a really nifty web IDE called Ares. Ares communicates with the webOS emulator, which runs on Virtual Box, via the web browser...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Originally post on Programmable Web Over the past few months at PW we’ve noticed steady increase in the number of mentions of Data as a Service (DaaS) and this trend looks to continue. Our first post on the subject was by a guest author Pete Soderling who introduced us to the concept and discussed pricing models. Then we continued the theme by posting about a partnership between a stock data site and an open data platform, working together to deliver a stock historical data API. The latest ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I just saw a tweet by @mhawksey linking to a government announcement: More than £200m will be invested by the Government in a network of elite Technology and Innovation Centres to drive growth in the UK’s most high-tech industries, it was announced today.</p> And what areas will be targeted? Each centre will focus on a specific technology where there is a potentially large global market and a significant UK capability. Areas identified as possibilities by Hermann Hauser included plastic e...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Cycling in the UK is not only a popular past time but and also a real commuting choice. The UK has numerous defined cycle routes and many towns and cities have designated cycling lanes and more recently London introduced a cycling scheme fondly referred to as Boris’ Bikes after the current Mayor of London. Since more and more people are using a bicycle as a preferred method of transport, and with cyclists having a different selection of routes, on top of the ordinary street network, than al...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The Configuring a Website that Uses Application Services page does cover Copying User Accounts from Development to Production but doesn't go into all that much detail. It really skips over the topic and starts talking about the ApplicationId and applicationName problem that a lot of people have had trouble with. This problem has also been covered by Scott Gu back in 2006. The part it skips over is that you can actually migrate your users and applications if you use the Database Publishing W...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
WIFI is absolutely essential for those working on the move. This is one reason why free WIFI is popping up all over the place. Cafes, public places with nearby shops and even petrol stations (service stations) are offering free WIFI as a way of enticing customers to use their services or visit their premises. This trend is set to continue. Surely. Today I'm making my fortnightly trip to London from Dundee. I normally get an East Coast mainline train direct from Dundee to London but today, sin...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I'm looking forward to Gary Vaynerchuk's new book called The Thank You Economy. I know what's going to be in it. But, I'm still going to buy it. This is the point that Gary will make in the book. I know what Gary means by "The Thank You Economy" as he's spoken about it loads of times before. He's used his last book, Crush It!: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion, as an example of this quite a few times. People who already go to Gary's blog regularly will have heard a lot of the co...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Here's an interesting example where Google really isn't returning the most relevant information. Search for "real-time web" and realtime3w.com gets returned in 9th position. All they have is a slightly relevant URL. Maybe this is actually an indicator that tells us the Google algorithm puts a massive weighting on the URL/domain. See and download the full gallery on posterous Permalink | Leave a comment »| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I was just looking at my web stats and was presented with a Chrome advertisement at the top of the page. But I'm already using Chrome so what's the point in showing me an advert for it. That's just a wasted advert impression. Google Adsense uses JavaScript to display each banner and there are a tonne of ways you can use JavaScript to detect what web browser the page is rendered in. So, why doesn't Adsense use this information when it displays an advert. An advert for Internet Explorer would h...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
First, it's worth having a listen to the Social Media White Noise Podcast episode. You can also view my comment on that page but since I wrote quite a bit I thought I'd copy it here: I've an opinion about the SEO point. Part of that is based on an annoyance at so many companies claiming to be SEO companies and "experts". The annoyance is based on knowing that some companies do very little for their money e.g. just update a report template document with the new client details and do a couple o...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
In case you hadn't noticed, when I'm not getting hit by flying trout, I like to think of myself as a bit of a real-time web guy. However, there's one thing I'd like clarification on, and I'm confident somebody will be able to shed some light on this: What are the differences between XMPP PubSub and PubSubHubbub and in what situations should each be used?</p> I do think I know some details about this but I’d like what I think I know to be confirmed or indeed corrected.</p> My knowledge of t...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
The number of services offering real-time APIs is slowly but surely expanding and it looks like we’re going to have to add quite a few more. Since the start of the year a new type of service has started to appear–client push services, which help developers include real-time updates in their web apps. Real-time client push APIs have actually been around for quite a while (around 10 years) as they are shipped with Comet servers but only recently have these been moved into the cloud and off...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
I was out with my friend. We'd had a couple of pints at the Taychreggan and decided to head into Broughty Ferry, near Dundee. On the way along Dundee Road I got hit, around the head, with a fish. It hurt. It wasn't a small fish. It's probably a mackerel (really not sure) weighing a few pounds. It jolted my neck. It bounced off of my neck and head and hit my friend. Now, because it's two guys of 31 it's funny. We can deal with it. We can probably see the funny side of it. If it were were an ...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
One of the reasons FourSquare is popular is because you can get awards or badges for your check-ins. Would it be of interest to anybody if you could get badges for your tweets? Some ideas for badges: The stalker badge - following more than X users The noise badge - Tweeting more than X times in the past hour The chatty badge - replying to X users in the past hour The profanity badge - swearing more than X times in your past X tweets The Romani badge - tweeting from more than x locations The g...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Just listening to the Social Media White Noise podcast and really enjoying it. I got distracted by something else and then tuned back into the podcast. They were talking about taking digital media consumption away from the computer, which really interests me, and I wanted to jump back to the start of that part of the podcast. I couldn't. Is there a podcast player that lets the podcast author define time slices that cover certain topics? Can this be published as part of the RSS feed so all MP...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Google have released a real-time search site aimed at showing search results as it happens. The disappointing thing is that although I'm sure that the results are instantly updated on the server they are not instantly updated in the web browser - they are still polling for new results. This means that the instant you get your search results back that the information is out of date. If a new result comes in between the poll requests then you won't get that update until the next poll. The exper...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
With the real-time web being claimed by some to be one of the core components of Web 3.0 it’s unsurprising that we are seeing more real-time APIs and real-time mashups being developed. One mashup has just been created using Kwwika and Superfeedr to demonstrate how two real-time platforms can be integrated to create a real-time news reader application. Superfeedr allows a developer to subscribe to any RSS feed and receive real-time notifications when a change is made to that feed. This is do...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Most of the time we write about mapping, it admittedly includes Google Maps (we list over 2000 Google Maps mashups). However, ESRI, the biggest supplier of geographic tools for the enterprise, has made huge strides this year with its tools, including its own web mapping platform, ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript API. Earlier this year ESRI released ArcGIS Server 10 and in the the past few months a stream of associated updates and new releases have been announced including version 2.0 of their JavaScrip...| Phil Leggetter - Developer Experience & Relations Leader
Just had a little idea for a website/web application that allows you to check when you are due to upgrade your mobile phone and a few other things. Something probably exists but here are a few ideas:Enter the details of your mobile phone co...| www.leggetter.co.uk