Arlen Stalwick

Software Developer

Hey there, I'm Arlen Stalwick, VP Engineering @ Wavo.me. I write about my projects and whatever it is that I'm trying to teach myself.


  1. NinePlaces

    I've just open sourced an old project of mine, NinePlaces, and I wanted to write a quick blog post about it - so that, at least, there's some small record somewhere of the work that I put into the project. What is NinePlaces? I worked on NinePlaces between 2008 and…


  2. Q - Collaborative Pixel Art

    For the #hackmtl hackathon, I decided to do something a bit different. To be honest, something a bit useless. I decided to create a collaborative toy: q.fuz.io. Q is a pixel-art canvas, shared by the everyone on the web. A visitor to Q is immediately assigned a tile,…


  3. Realtime Node.js and Backbone Boilerplate Code

    I've had to do a few projects lately that require using Socket.io as the primary transport for single page apps communicating with a server. Having looked around a bit on the web, there are not a whole lot of examples as to how to do this using Backbone.js.…


  4. Taming Javascript's 'this' Keyword

    My last blog entry, Understanding Javascript's 'this' Keyword, explained how Javascript's this keyword is different from other languages, and what kinds of pitfalls to expect when using it. Here, I'll show you some techniques for getting this under control. VAR SELF = THIS Natively, Javascript has a few ways to help…


  5. Understanding Javascript's 'this' Keyword

    Javascript is a pretty great little language, but it can be a bit special at times. One particularly unintuitive aspect of Javascript is the this keyword. As a (former?) C++/C# developer, I've always had certain expectations as to how this behaves. Javascript does a pretty good job at confounding…


  6. Amazon SQS vs. RabbitMQ

    Heads Up: This post is quite old. Friends don't let friends make business decisions based on four-year-old blog posts. We've been using Amazon SQS where I work for awhile. We have a fairly heavy (though, that's relative: we're a small company) cloud application that makes use of a bunch of…

    on Amazon AWS, Amazon SQS, Message Queue, RabbitMQ