Ona Nairobi's mascot and destroyer of dog beds, Mali
We started Ona six months ago and it’s been quite the ride so far. Since launching, we’ve completed a few cool projects, which we'll be posting soon to the website. A major success was building the vote tallying system used in Libya's elections. We've also added key new hires to a growing amazing team. We’re just now catching our breath, so we’re taking a minute to say hello world!
At Ona we are rebuilding our data management platform. We are starting with a light weight front-end that will serve up content pulled from the REST API of our current application. We are aiming to have the back-end in Clojure, the front-end in ClojureScript, and the infrastructure in Clojure using Pallet. We are excited to have a single (and a great) language handle all of these responsibilities.
We are still at a very early stage but we are a distributed team and like to have our apps on development boxes as we go. This allows us to share a common reference point, give mini-demos, and QA each other’s changes. Like Fabric for Python and Capistrano for Ruby, Pallet let’s us do quick deploys of the latest master or branch code.
Even better, Pallet let’s us write Clojure to bring up new clusters, similarly to Puppet, Chef, or Ansible – but in Clojure. We deploy to EC2 on AWS and are glad to avoid spending time mucking around in the AWS GUI. A succinct pallet file specifies the instance, the web application, and the deployment. Putting the current code online and bringing up a server (if one doesn’t already exist) is a single command:
lein do uberjar, with-profile +pallet pallet up --phases install,configure,deploy
This tells Leiningen to first create an uberjar,
which puts all of our app’s dependencies in a single jar file. It then uses
the pallet profile to install, configure, and deploy our application. This
command is idempotent, making it easy to push the latest jar up.
A nuance we did not anticipate is that you cannot output logs to stdout in a
Jetty app. This is not particularly surprising, but using stdout was a development
configuration that we had not yet bothered to abstract.
For now we are handling this with the below middleware wrapper:
(defn wrap-with-logger [handler verbose?]
(if verbose?
(logger/wrap-with-logger handler "/dev/stdout")
(fn [request] (handler request))))
This does the normal logging if verbose? is true and otherwise does nothing.
When you run lein ring server-headless a handler is called which sets verbose?
to true. When you run the app through java -jar ..., as in our pallet configuration,
verbose? is set to false.
The ona-viewer project is a work-in-progress and we would welcome any feedback. Check it out on github.
We just had an exciting week at the Nairobi office. The New York team came down to build our synergies, share ideas, feast on ugali and spot some game. Top of the agenda was redesigning Ona's user interface and adding new functionality for our enterprise users. We're excited about the updated user interface that will make it easier to manage, visualize and share your data. Expect to see new additions to Ona in the next few months! Here are a few highlights from the trip:
Continue reading NYC to Nairobi: Great Ideas and Good Times!...
We recently built the tallying software used to aggregate votes in the Libyan constitutional assembly elections. Our software recorded, verified, and reported on over 720,000 votes cast by Libyan citizens. These votes were cast throughout the country, on off-shore oil rigs, and at international voting centers throughout the world.
Continue reading Building the Tally software used in the Libyan Constitutional Election...
Today Larry Weya gave a presentation at the Python Nairobi Meetup titled Little known and/or useful Python features for fun & profit.
The slides are below: