An Open Letter to Anyone Moving to San Francisco for a Tech Job — The Bold Italic — San Francisco How great that you’ll be moving to San Francisco so soon! It sounds like you landed a great job at a local tech company. Now you write asking for advice. What should you be aware of before moving to San…
Microservices are a thing these days. When I was at SoundCloud , I was responsible for the migration from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application to a constellation of microservices. I’ve told the tech
One Thursday morning in early June, the ballroom of the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, in Menlo Park, was closed for a private presentation. The grand banquet hall appeared worthy of the sprawling resort’s
On a typical day, St. Anthony's, a soup kitchen in San Francisco, serves up to 2,400 meals. Though the city is in the midst of an economic boom, the line for the dining room is often so long that gues
9 min read · Sep 21, 2015 -- Spoiler alert: my uterus doesn’t have much to say on the matter of technology and how it can improve people’s lives, though my brain has quite a bit to offer. The same is
In a 1997 segment on the short-lived tech TV show The Site , host Soledad O’Brien sits at a bar in front of a laptop computer, talking to Dev Null, a full-scale human avatar with frosted fuchsia tips
“We meet in the most tragic of circumstances,” Judy Clarke, the lead defense lawyer representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, began. She stood at a lectern, facing the jurors, in a dark suit accented by a blue-
Many of our customers spend their entire working day in Intercom, switching between the inbox, user list, and user profile pages. We aim to delight these folks with a beautifully fast product, not to
Like many startups, Uber began its journey with a monolithic architecture, built for a single offering in a single city. At the time, all of Uber was our UberBLACK option and our “world” was San Francisco. Having one codebase seemed “clean” at the time, and solved our core business problems, which…
An API is a language and, for successful communication, parties need to understand each other. Backend APIs often dictate the rules and styles of this language and it’s the client’s job to adhere to it. Even with a common “alphabet” like JSON. In this guide we will explore Ember Data strategies that…
“Y ou have to Orientalize us.” my new friend in Tunis told me. “No,” I told her, with tight-lipped determination. “I will write the hell out of it, and people will read it.” Flying into the lovely and
The Times has a story today on the rise in homicide in some American cities. It’s an important story—one which is hurt by the utterly baseless suggestion that those who protested against Ferguson may
T en years ago, shortly after the floodwaters subsided, James Gray stood in the ruins of his New Orleans home and tried to salvage what remained of his belongings. They fit inside a handbag. “I don’t
In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society. Ban money and advertisements and make
I was recently drawn into another discussion about a claim that project Foo was faster than project Bar because Foo is written in C (or maybe C++) and Bar is written in Java. In my experience, as a long-time kernel programmer and as someone who often codes in C even when there are almost certainly…
Memory Allocators 101 May 15, 2013 For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of patches to tcmalloc, Google's super high performance memory allocator. I'm going to post about them soon, bu
If I offer you $50 today or $100 one year from now, you'll take the $50. Yet if I offer $50 in five years or $100 in six years, you'll pick $100, which seems irrational given the difference is still o
via Getty Images, FUSION Hello, and welcome to the guide to debunking “black-on-black crime” and all of its rhetorical cousins. Black-on-black crime may no longer be the right-wing media’s slogan du jour, but its replacements express the same sentiment. Inevitably, when there’s an uptick of…
If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous re
Don’t stare, it’s rude. The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman
So lately I’ve had people passing around this article by Caitlin Flanagan about the p.c. police ruining campus comedy, which appears to be stage one of a one-two punch from t he Atlantic about how p.c
2014/11/19 OK, queues. People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks a
Credit: Flickr / JD Hancock When I decided it was time to leave my corporate tech job, I made an 18 month plan. One key item on it: speaking at conferences. I prepped one talk (building it off some of
posted 19 Oct 2014 We’ve seen in the previous blog posts how Clojure’s persistent vectors work (ifyou’re interested, you can start at part 1 ). In part 3 , wediscovered how the persistent vector tail
I recently started a job search for community management, event organisation, technical writing, or a related position in tech. Browsing the internet, Twitter and my personal networks, I found it extr
It is important to many companies to retain both men and women and gender-diverse employees, but in this article, we explore how to retain women specifically. Keep in mind, however, that these strateg
by Nate Berkopec ( @nateberkopec )of (who?) ,a Rails performance consultancy. Summary: Most "scaling" resources for Ruby apps are written by companies with hundreds of requests per second. What about
William Marston, the psychologist and comic author who created Wonder Woman, believed that the only way to save the world from war was for women to rule the world and for men to become more like women
Production still via Wikimedia Commons At a time when we've been inundated with reboots, from Point Break to Spider-Man (soon to get a re-reboot ), it only seems fitting that Fantastic Four would join
10 August 2015 by Joris Leverink for Roar Mag Bookchin’s municipalist ideas, once rejected by communists and anarchists alike, have now come to inspire the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy. The introduction to the new book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct…
Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later William J. Lewinski, a psychologist who has studied police shootings, held a training session at the Association for Los Angeles De
Over the next few weeks, The Atlantic will be publishing a series of responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me . (An excerpt is available online .) This is the fifth in a series. Reader
Fiddle is a little-known module that was added to Ruby's standard library in 1.9.x. It allow you to interact directly with C libraries from Ruby. It even lets you inspect and alter the ruby interprete
Posted on by in Architecture In their haste to deliver software capabilities, developers sometimes engage in less-than-optimal coding practices. If not addressed, these shortcuts can ultimately yield unexpected rework costs that offset the benefits of rapid delivery. Technical debt conceptualizes…
If you think this screen shows the Ubers that are nearby, you’re wrong. Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images In June, the California Labor Commission ruled in favor of classifying Uber driver Barbara Ann
There has been a lot written lately about the dearth of women in technology, and about the droves of women who are leaving tech companies . Much of the conversation has centered around Silicon Valley startups, given their reputation as the source of hot new technology. But some new research from…
posted 24 Oct 2013 In the previous post about Clojure’s persistent vectors ( read it , if youhaven’t already), we kind-of understood how insertion, updates and poppingelements in a vector worked. We d
Published in Netflix TechBlog · 7 min read · Jul 14, 2015 -- It’s 2 a.m. and half of our reliability team is online searching for the root cause of why Netflix streaming isn’t working. None of our sys
1. Thievery “Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!” -- Glen Bateman, in Stephen King’s The Stand It’s not the thievery. It’s the goddamned theorizing . When I started doing comedy – back in…
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