This post originally appeared as a response to "Forming a new software startup, how do I allocate ownership fairly? " at Answers.OnStartups.com, a member site of the Stack Exchange network. ------- Th
Have you ever had trouble starting something? I'm not talking about startinga car in winter, but some work, maybe a new project or a blog post. Beginningnew projects can be difficult. Can you remember
Log Structured Merge Trees It’s nearly a decade since Google released its ‘Big Table’ paper. One of the many cool aspects of that paper was the file organisation it uses. The approach is more generall
This is an edited excerpt from “ I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life ,” which will be published on August 9th by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The F
Data denormalization is broken August 21st 2016 6,156 reads @lironshapira Liron Shapira Why it’s impossible to write good application-layer code for everyday business logic Backend engineers can’t wri
Joshua Gowin Ph.D. You, Illuminated Stress Under Pressure: Your Brain on Conflict Why drama is bad for your brain. Posted Apr 06, 2011 Conflict elicits stress, our self- defense mechanism against harmful elements in our world. Stress tells us one of two things: I've been hurt, or I'm about to be…
Everybody counts, but not always quickly. This article is a close look into how PostgreSQL optimizes counting. If you know the tricks there are ways to count rows orders of magnitude faster than you d
When you have to build a web application, you are often asked to add search. The magnifying glass is something that we now add to wireframes without even knowing what we are going to search. The searc
Listen to this article One of the interesting patterns that we’ve seen, as a result of managing one of the largest fleets of Postgres databases , is one or two tables growing at a rate that’s much lar
Introduction As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to comp
Photo Illustration: Matt Wisniewski / Photograph: Ibán Ramón / Artwork: John Deardourff One day in February 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt h
Listen to this article We recently launched Apache Kafka on Heroku into beta. Just like we do with Heroku Postgres, our internal engineering teams have been using our Kafka service to power a number o
Kamil Lelonek Follow Aug 20, 2016 · 6 min read To raise, or not to raise, that is the question. Some time ago, I had an extremely interesting discussion regarding controlling a flow in applications. W
I’ve always been a do-it-yourself investor. This habit started around age 19 with a series of ridiculous speculative trades in individual high-tech company stocks. “This stock is sure to go through th
We ❤ Elasticsearch at Scrunch and are constantly finding new use cases for it. We heavily utilise aggregations, write complex function score queries and index mass quantities of documents every day. After a year of running it in production, we’ve learned a few lessons that we’d like to share with…
In a New York Post article that’s gone viral this week, Meghann Foye, argues for “Meternity” leave – something she imagines has “all the perks of maternity leave – without having kids.” It’s a silly little article posted for the purpose of marketing her novel “ Meternity … about a woman who fakes a…
I manage a somewhat sizable fleet of ElasticSearch clusters. How large? Well, “large” is relative these days. Strictly in ElasticSearch data nodes, it’s currently operating at the order of: several pe
Allergies such as peanut allergy and hay fever make millions of us miserable, but scientists aren’t even sure why they exist. Carl Zimmer talks to a master immunologist with a controversial answer. Fo
Since Segment’s first launch in 2012, we’ve used queues everywhere . Our API queues messages immediately. Our workers communicate by consuming from one queue and then publishing to another. It’s given
About once a year, there's a blog post from one of the current Tech Unicorns about how they had a big data problem and solved it with a slightly non-standard usage of MySQL. This is a really good thin
Counting is core to what we do at Smyte . Our realtime spam and fraud fighting software analyzes an event stream and needs to answer many questions about it. Effective questions often begin with “how
Published Apr 4, 2016 PostgreSQL Bloat: origins, monitoring and managing writestuff postgresql guest Free 30 Day Trial In Robert M. Wysocki's latest Write Stuff article, he looks at the wider aspects
The Moneta project: Next generation EVCache for better cost optimization Netflix Technology Blog Follow May 25, 2016 · 13 min read With the global expansion of Netflix earlier this year came the globa
I’m really excited to announce a major new feature in Apache Kafka v0.10: Kafka’s Streams API . The Streams API, available as a Java library that is part of the official Kafka project, is the easiest
If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been studying penguins at McMurdo these last few seasons you may have missed the attention “Time Series” has been getting in the Big Data space. Then again, may
Accepting Reality The reality is this: Rails is tailor made for Basecamp. We all know that, or we should. Basecamp-like apps are not too difficult to make, at least in terms of architecture. You don't
Building an email system requires efficiently managing a huge amount of information essentially from day one. Our sync system has more data for a single user than most startup’s database of everything
Every once in awhile I like to take a walk down memory lane and highlight an old-school entrepreneur who isn’t typically talked about nowadays. Why? Because people today are soft and we’ve completely
This is an edited and expanded transcript of a talk I gave at Strange Loop 2014 . The video recording (embedded below) has been watched over 8,000 times. For those of you who prefer reading, I thought
Why I own two digital agencies and buy small software companies for a living JD Graffam Mar 22, 2016 · 7 min read “Buyers like us, we have a lot of options. It’s a buyer’s market.” My friend, a succes
March 3, 2016 Published by Igor Maravić Whenever a user performs an action in the Spotify client—such as listening to a song or searching for an artist—a small piece of information, an event, is sent
_I originally wrote the following for my Chainline Newsletter , but I continue to get tweets about this idea, so I'm re-publishing the article here on my blog. This version has been lightly edited._ I
Messages have been part of Facebook for many years, beginning as direct messaging similar to email (available in your inbox the next time you visited the site) and then eventually evolving into a real
2016-02-13 “Every line of code is written without reason, maintained out of weakness, and deleted by chance” Jean-Paul Sartre’s Programming in ANSI C. Every line of code written comes at a price: main
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