Nathan Selikoff on Omnimodal's real-time tech stack
Nathan joins Sam and Ryan to talk about how he's using Ember, Rails, Node, and AWS infrastructure to build Omnimodal, the startup he co-founded to help cities manage their transportation demand in real time.
Topics include:
- 4:23 – Overview of Omnimodal's tech stack
- 6:38 – Omnimodal's mission: to help cities manage transportation demand
- 16:10 – How to ingest open transportation data and present it in real time
- 21:43 – How graphics-heavy OpenGL and C++ apps can benefit from web tooling
- 31:06 – Why state machines are used in both video game and web development
- 34:55 – How JavaScript UI development compares to other paradigms
- 38:46 – Why Ember and Rails were chosen for Omnimodal's technology needs
- 42:09 – Using a prediction engine to improve on transportation schedules
- 44:56 - How Omnimodal gets data from its hardware trackers to the Rails server
- 50:55 – How services like Heroku and PubNub, custom AWS code, and the concept of a Data Lake help address scalability issues
- 56:40 – How deploys are coordinated across multiple services
- 59:47 - What the development process looks like for a multi-service tech stack
- 1:02:10 – What the complexity breakdown is between Omnimodal's frontend and backend
- 1:04:07 – Lessons learned on authentication while using Auth0
- 1:09:31 - Lessons learned on data modeling
- 1:12:21 – Tech choices, escape hatches, what's worked, and what hasn't
- 1:20:15 – Things Nathan loves about Ember, and things that are challenging