Nathan Selikoff on Omnimodal's real-time tech stack

Topics include:

• 4:23 – Overview of Omnimodal's tech stack
• 6:38 – Omnimodal's mission: to help cities manage transportation demand
• 16:10 – How to ingest open transportation data and present it in real time
• 21:43 – How graphics-heavy OpenGL and C++ apps can benefit from web tooling
• 31:06 – Why state machines are used in both video game and web development
• 34:55 – How JavaScript UI development compares to other paradigms
• 38:46 – Why Ember and Rails were chosen for Omnimodal's technology needs
• 42:09 – Using a prediction engine to improve on transportation schedules
• 44:56 - How Omnimodal gets data from its hardware trackers to the Rails server
• 50:55 – How services like Heroku and PubNub, custom AWS code, and the concept of a Data Lake help address scalability issues
• 56:40 – How deploys are coordinated across multiple services
• 59:47 - What the development process looks like for a multi-service tech stack
• 1:02:10 – What the complexity breakdown is between Omnimodal's frontend and backend
• 1:04:07 – Lessons learned on authentication while using Auth0
• 1:09:31 - Lessons learned on data modeling
• 1:12:21 – Tech choices, escape hatches, what's worked, and what hasn't
• 1:20:15 – Things Nathan loves about Ember, and things that are challenging

Links:

• Nathan on Twitter
• Omnimodal.io
• PubNub
• GTFS feed specification
• Amazon Kinesis
• Amazon ElastiCache
• AWS AppSync
• Auth0