This short post by a member of Ably's engineering team describes how we resolved a problem that is typical of the challenges we face each week. We thrive on solving hard distributed system problems that are mostly platform agnostic and theoretical in nature, and this is the first post in a long-term series of articles about things we've learned recently.

Over the last few years, companies have used realtime updates to add new experiences and features and increase their market share, It’s now standard to expect a page within an app or browser to update parts of itself without forcing it to refresh. For example, a news page of live sports scores updates with the latest goal scored, or an app shows a change as you track your taxi on a map.

This post describes how I built a realtime collaboration app that scrum teams can use for planning poker. Planning poker, also known as Scrum poker, is a gamified technique for estimating the size of user stories. This helps in deciding how many stories can be put into a sprint. Usually story points in the Fibonacci scale is used as a metric, but T-shirt sizing, like small, medium, and large, is also used.

Standardized a decade ago through RFC 6455, WebSocket has since matured into one of the main technologies powering the modern web. Designed to be event-driven and full-duplex, and optimized for minimum overhead and low latency, WebSockets have become a preferred choice for many organizations and developers seeking to build interactive, realtime digital experiences that provide delightful user experiences.

Here at Ably, we constantly strive to enhance our state-of-the-art product offering and to provide an industry-leading developer experience for our users. As a testament to our ongoing efforts, we’re delighted to announce that Ably has recently won three 2021 DevPortal Awards: The DevPortal Awards aims to: This is the second year running when Ably has taken part in the DevPortal Awards. In 2020, we won two DevPortal Awards.

Ably is a platform for pub/sub messaging. Publishes are done on named channels, and clients subscribed to a given channel have all messages on that channel delivered to them. The Ably pub/sub backend is multi-region: we run the production cluster in 7 AWS regions, and channel pub/sub operates seamlessly between them.

Here at Ably we consider software development to be in our DNA. We write and maintain a lot of code, much of it open-source, with full public visibility, and we host and manage it using the GitHub platform. The code is segmented into numerous discrete repositories, each with a specific scope and purpose. We've been using GitHub heavily since Ably was founded in 2016, so we have plenty of history, and we're committed to the platform.