About Tickex - Technology

“The stone has started rolling. It will become a great mountain & fill the whole earth”
Yukihiro Matsumoto aka “Matz”, Japan August 2004

Those of a certain nature may be wondering how Tickex does what it does & how did we build it? Well we won’t tell you everything, just some interesting titbits & perhaps a little bit of office gossip.

First of all you need to start in a cramped, pokey office in the terribly bleak London Docklands. This, of course is not essential, but it does give you enough motivation to be successful and move onto somewhere nicer (canal view Islington).

Secondly, you really need to think about your technology and be able to answer questions like;
· What do you need it to do now?
· What will you need it to do over the next few years?
· How will you make it scale?
· How will you not send the company broke by solving all your problems with really powerful and expensive servers?

Thirdly, you need to make some decisions then go ahead & start work. It’s vitally important at this stage that you have sourced the best take out coffee in the area, as you will be drinking a lot of the stuff.

“Bad things should be ugly” – Matz

No mishmash of Java, Tomcat, C++, Struts, WebSphere, Solaris, IIS, Cold Fusion, C#, Perl, Groovy, Spring, Bash scripts, .Net, and PHP for us. Oh no; absolutely not at all. Frankly life is to short and we like to ship solid, reliable & tested code regularly.

We use open source technologies where it makes sense for us. This just happens to be everywhere. We build our own servers; use Gentoo & Slackware Linux for our operating system, MySQL where we need a database, & Ruby on Rails to give us that Web 2.0 shine. Our Search Engine is a little more complex, but all you need to know is that it’s built upon our very own super secret special sauce.

[:linux, :mysql, :ruby, :rails].each { |go| Build::Web2.0.fast + inexpensive + reliable }

Fourthly, & perhaps this is the most important step of all. Go easy on the take out curries & show some consideration for the others in the office. Some of the effects do go on for quite awhile.

Fifthly, get excited. Once you start, it’s very hard to stop.

“The stone has started rolling. It will become a great mountain & fill the whole earth” – Matz