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.

Ably was the delegate sponsor at GopherCon UK this year and we had a great time. The conference was held in The Brewery, London. For many of our team members it was the first physical developer event they had been to in almost two years. Whilst I am thrilled to be returning to face-to-face interaction and the depth of conversation they enable, I certainly forgot how early a start physical events are.

Here at Ably, we’ve helped many people to solve some truly interesting, and at times wacky data distribution problems. Be it helping to organise transport for the healthcare sector, or acting as one of the key communication layers on a VR platform; in more and more aspects of our lives, we’re expecting online experiences to happen in realtime. Unsurprisingly though, one key use-case reemerges every time: chat.

We recently announced Ably's Control API, a REST API that enables you to manage Ably's configuration programmatically. You can now use the Control API to configure anything previously only configurable via the Ably dashboard. The Ably platform is designed around four pillars of dependability: Performance, Integrity, Reliability, and Availability.

Whether React is your favorite JavaScript framework or not, it is the most commonly used web framework. If you're building single-page apps, high fidelity frontends, or even in some cases static sites, there's a high chance that you're using React to do it. In the past it was sometimes difficult to decide on the best place to put code from libraries, such as ably-js, which can cause re-renders, and which have their own state management.