Over the last few years, companies have used realtime updates to add new experiences and features and increase their market share, It’s now standard to expect a page within an app or browser to update parts of itself without forcing it to refresh. For example, a news page of live sports scores updates with the latest goal scored, or an app shows a change as you track your taxi on a map.

This post describes how I built a realtime collaboration app that scrum teams can use for planning poker. Planning poker, also known as Scrum poker, is a gamified technique for estimating the size of user stories. This helps in deciding how many stories can be put into a sprint. Usually story points in the Fibonacci scale is used as a metric, but T-shirt sizing, like small, medium, and large, is also used.

Standardized a decade ago through RFC 6455, WebSocket has since matured into one of the main technologies powering the modern web. Designed to be event-driven and full-duplex, and optimized for minimum overhead and low latency, WebSockets have become a preferred choice for many organizations and developers seeking to build interactive, realtime digital experiences that provide delightful user experiences.

Here at Ably, we constantly strive to enhance our state-of-the-art product offering and to provide an industry-leading developer experience for our users. As a testament to our ongoing efforts, we’re delighted to announce that Ably has recently won three 2021 DevPortal Awards: The DevPortal Awards aims to: This is the second year running when Ably has taken part in the DevPortal Awards. In 2020, we won two DevPortal Awards.

Ably is a platform for pub/sub messaging. Publishes are done on named channels, and clients subscribed to a given channel have all messages on that channel delivered to them. The Ably pub/sub backend is multi-region: we run the production cluster in 7 AWS regions, and channel pub/sub operates seamlessly between them.

Here at Ably we consider software development to be in our DNA. We write and maintain a lot of code, much of it open-source, with full public visibility, and we host and manage it using the GitHub platform. The code is segmented into numerous discrete repositories, each with a specific scope and purpose. We've been using GitHub heavily since Ably was founded in 2016, so we have plenty of history, and we're committed to the platform.

Great user experience on the web comes from being able to provide users with exactly what they want in the most seamless way possible. Behind the scenes, some user actions may take more time to process than others. For example, showing or hiding an HTML element is a quick operation whereas making an XHR request to get data from an external API is a slower operation. JavaScript provides us with a way to handle them all without giving up that instant delight users naturally expect.

Anyone who's worked in technology has likely hit on the "build vs. buy" question at some point. Should you build your own custom solution to meet the exact requirements of your business? Or does it make more financial sense and save time if you use a third-party vendor? Let's use an example. You are a tech lead at a company that delivers a platform for online learning.

Many technology companies have an ongoing commitment to their customers to guarantee reliability and uptime, with service level agreements that guarantee to resolve or escalate incidents within a particular time frame. Engineering team members rotate shifts so that someone is always on-call to be "paged" (these days, not using an actual pager) if an issue arises. Being on-call means that you typically need to be responsive even outside of your usual office hours.

Livestreams allow an online audience to come together and watch a video broadcast in realtime. Globally, uptake has soared since 2020 as people come together to experience live sports and arts events; and to work, learn and play. The popularity of livestream entertainment is, in part, down to how it includes the audience. Integrated chat and other features allow viewers to interact -- with each other and the host.