brian buser June 30, 2009
Grockit is live in Amazon’s EC2! This means faster performance for our users and reduced hosting costs for us!
We recently posted about moving our test suite into the cloud and how it resulted in a 90% decrease in our build time. We’ve now moved our entire site into the cloud as well.
Nathan Sobo, Grockit Director of Engineering, explains,”Other providers may offer value-added services and support, but our engineers have all the expertise we need to administer our production environment. We simply don’t want to house and maintain the physical hardware. EC2 is a great choice for us because of its narrow focus. It gives us flexible access to the raw commodity of computation, storage at minimal cost, and allows us deal with the rest on our own.”
We hope you enjoy our latest effort to make Grockit faster and more enjoyable for you to use!
brian buser June 26, 2009
If you are curious like me to know how much you remember from your high school days, create an account and play one of our SAT Diagnostics to find out. SAT Diags are a new feature we released this week and are a sampling of questions taken to determine a baseline of a student’s abilities before they begin playing games in Grockit. The diagnostic helps Grockit adapt to a student’s strengths and weaknesses and gives you a rank amongst other students.
If you don’t already have a Grockit account, you may sign in with your Facebook credentials or create a free account to play. Let us know how you do. Good luck!
arena reed June 12, 2009
Last week we began rolling out analytics and custom reviews to our groups. You’ll see the features mature over the next few weeks as we incorporate feedback from our users.
The GMAT Group is the best example of fine grained analytics. If you’ve been studying for the GMAT and you’ve attempted a significant number of questions you will be able to see your accuracy across 50+ quantitative skills and 30+ verbal skills. With this information you can identify what your weaknesses are (presuming you have any) and track your progress in those areas. You can filter by time range and difficulty; for example, you can filter to see your performance on difficult questions in the last 7 days.
SAT members currently see a smaller set of specific skills and will start to see more detail over the coming weeks.
So, I bet your thinking “Great, but what can I do with this information?”
Research* supports that getting feedback on your performance is one of the keys to learning. So play some practice SAT or GMAT games then checkout your profile to see your performance across skills.
Select the skills that you are most interested in and create a custom review of just those types of questions. Our expertly written explanations will help you gain insight into those skills.
* Research dating back to theorizing by William James‘ in his seminal book “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals”
(Angie Tombari, Grockit’s summer intern specializing in Educational Psychology collaborated on this post)
farbood nivi June 5, 2009
We work hard to maintain a disciplined, agile, and test driven development practice at Grockit. To this end, our test suite must be green (have no failing tests) before we can push our new code and features to our demo, and ultimately, production sites.
Until recently we ran our test suite locally on a Mac Pro machine running multiple VM ware instances. Our build was split into fast and slow builds so that we could shorten the feedback on tests that fail. This process got us to a build time of about 45 minutes from beginning to end assuming the build didn’t stop short due to a test failing.
We have since moved our test suite into Amazon EC2 so that we could reduce the overall build time by parallelizing our tests from two tests running simultaneously to over 10 tests. We are really excited by the results. We’ve managed to reduce our build time by almost 90%. The build now takes approx five min from start to finish.
Our EC2 distributed build depends in a large part on TeamCity, a continuous integration product from JetBrains. Our build is split into 15 fragments which are each defined as a TeamCity build configuration. When code is checked in, the TeamCity hub, running in EC2, can distribute the running of build configurations to any of nine build agents, which are also running in the cloud. In minutes, all of the build configurations are executed and results are reported back to the central server, informing our team members via a web interface displayed on a large screen in our office. We also made a simple GreaseMonkey script to turn the background of the monitoring page red when any of our build configurations fail, which helps increase visibility.
With our build cut down from 45+ minutes to less than five minutes, there is a palpable sense of increased momentum in our development process. It’s also interesting how removing this bottleneck made other process problems less of an issue. For instance, we were considering adding a feature that allowed our product manager to toggle feature sets as visible or hidden in production dynamically. This was needed because once a feature set was ready, we would need yet another round trip through the build cycle for developers to ‘unhide’ the functionality in the production environment. When our test suite took 45 minutes, this was a big deal. But now that its fast, the pain of this manual step is far less acute. The moral of the story: find the biggest bottleneck and eliminate it before worrying about others.
Most importantly, for our users, this means more frequent deployments of new features, bug fixes and performance improvements.
