LDC Via launched at Engage 2015

Last week, most of the the LDC Via team attended the Engage User Group event in Ghent, Belgium along with 320 other people.

As ever, Theo ran an amazing couple of days with a wonderful venue, content and catering and we were very happy to be sponsoring for the first time.

Among all of the sessions and conversations, LDC Via was officially launched!

From today you can go to our website and register a free account to try out our Domino migration utilities.

See what you can do with our standard application templates, and investigate what you can build with our full featured programming layer.

Ben and Matt presented a session introducing LDC Via: you can download the slide deck from our website.

It’s traditional at these user groups to run a giveaway competition. Thanks to everyone who entered our word search, you all did very well. The lucky winner of our Sonos Play:1 was Simon Peek from We4IT.

We want to talk about documentation. No don't go!

… it’s interesting! Well, useful. We promise.

Here at LDC Via Towers we’re all developers, and a large portion of our lives is spent working with badly documented APIs. We’ve just created our own API for you to work with your LDC Via data and we wanted to make sure that it’s as painless for you as possible. Enter the <trumpets sound> LDC Via API Documentation site </trumpets fade>.

The high-water mark of API documentation, in our opinion, is from Stripe and you’ll see that our site is very similar in structure. Our API site is very much a living document. A lot of our time currently is spent using our own API. When we spot things that are confusing or incomplete, we fix them. But as always, if you have any suggestions please let us know using the “Ask Us” link to the side of this post (and indeed on most other LDC Via pages).

Of course, we didn’t develop the site ourselves, we”re too busy writing our own code. Instead we used the wonderful Slate project from Tripit.

MongoDB security

MongoDB security concerns have recently hit the press: you may have seen some of the posts. The latest focusses on some German students who identified tens of thousands of MongoDB databases that are wide open: no security on them at all!

Information Age: Major security alert as 40,000 MongoDB databases left unsecured on the internet

Setting aside the insanity of not performing the most basic of security procedures, it’s probably good to outline how we at LDC Via approach this sort of thing, courtesy of our very own Matt White…

It’s a pain in the bum for us to get access to the databases, let alone anyone else.

Yep. We lock our MongoDB servers down. We lock them away from the internet. We lock our databases down. And then we employ application-level security too. That’s how it should always be done.

ConnectED crossword: we have a winner

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the first and last annual LDC Via ConnectED competition crossword is: Nathan Freeman. Congratulations!

Here is Nathan being presented with his prize before the Closing Session of the conference.

Thank you all for playing our little game. I hope you had as much fun doing the crossword as we had in putting it together. If you’re still wondering what some of the answers were, here is the completed version to put you out of your misery.

ConnectED crossword: a bonus tip!

Okay, we said we wouldn’t give any more tips, but we’re feeling especially nice today.

If a clue contains a word that might imply things being disassembled or assembled - for example “destroyed”, “in disarray”, “broken”, “rebuilt” - that probably means you’re looking for an anagram in the clue.

Now hurry up: you only have until midday today to get your solution to Ben Poole (@benpoole), Mark Myers (@stickfight) or Julian Woodward (@woowar)!

See earlier blog entries for previous tips.