While building applications with RethinkDB, I often find cases where I want to be able to produce simple visualizations to help me better understand my data. Ideally, I’d like to take the output of a simple query and see what it looks like in a graph with as little work as possible. A new project recently introduced by the developers at Medium offers a compelling solution.

Medium’s product science team built a lightweight web application called Charted that makes it easy for users to generate and share graphs. As input, the user provides a URL that points to CSV data. Charted processes the data and produces simple graphs with a clean and elegant design. No configuration is needed, though it allows the user to choose between bar and line formats and customize certain aspects of the output.

Thanksgiving is almost here: it is time to configure your dinner tables for family clusters and prepare some turkey for batch insertion of stuffing. To show how thankful we are for our amazing community, we put together this tasty video playlist with our best leftovers from October and November. It will help keep you entertained while you try not to succumb to the inevitable post-turkey tryptophan coma. Enjoy!

Modern frameworks and standards make it easy for developers to build web applications that support realtime updates. You can push the latest data to your users, offering a seamless experience that results in higher engagement and better usability. With the right architecture on the backend, you can put polling out to pasture and liberate your users from the tyranny of the refresh button.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how I built a realtime Instagram client for the web. The application, which is called CatThink, displays a live feed of new Instagram pictures that have the #catsofinstagram tag. Why cats of Instagram? Because it’s one of the photo service’s most popular and beloved tags. People on the internet really, really like cats. Or maybe we just think we do because our feline companions have reprogrammed us with brain parasites.

Dokku is a simple application deployment system built on Docker. It gives you a Heroku-like PaaS environment on your own Linux system, enabling you to deploy your applications with git. Dokku automatically configures the proper application runtime environment, installs all of the necessary dependencies, and runs each application in its own isolated container. You can easily run Dokku on your own server or an inexpensive Linux VPS.

The RethinkDB Dokku plugin, created by Stuart Bentley, lets developers create containerized RethinkDB instances for their Dokku-deployed apps. I’ve found that Dokku is a really convenient way to share my RethinkDB demos while I’m prototyping without having to manually deploy and configure each one. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how you can set up Dokku and install the plugin on a Digital Ocean droplet.

Join the RethinkDB team at the following upcoming events:

RethinkDB at HTML5DevConf

October 21-22, Moscone Center

RethinkDB will be in San Francisco next week for HTML5DevConf, a popular event for frontend web developers. Conference attendees will be able to find us at table 29 in the conference expo hall. You can see our latest demo apps and meet RethinkDB co-founder, Slava Akhmechet. We will also have some fun RethinkDB goodies on hand to give away, including shirts and stickers.