A fter graduating with a degree in Computer Science, I moved to New York City to pursue my first job as a Junior Developer at a small software firm. When my first day rolled around, I was bright-eyed

Recently, we had to make a decision: sell Wistia for a life changing amount of money or keep building the business ourselves. UPDATE August 23rd, 2018. Following much demand, Chris and Brendan held a

Scaling is hard. Design decisions that initially seemed reasonable break down with little warning, and suddenly even the simplest parts of your data model need to go through a complex re-architecture.

Children Bad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed. | From the December 2017 issue Media Contact & Reprint Requests (Joanna Andreasson) One day last year, a citizen on a pr

Here are some easy tips to improve your performance at almost anything. How you practice makes a big difference. You need to think about feedback loops, deliberate practice, and working in chunks. The

It’s a wonderful idea to try to find a set of systems and principles that “work better” for big swaths of your life. Better habits , better mental tendencies , better methods of inquiry , and so on. W

matter The body’s microbial community may influence the brain and behavior, perhaps even playing a role in dementia, autism and other disorders. Credit... Sean McSorley In 2014 John Cryan, a professor

Let Children Get Bored Again Boredom teaches us that life isn’t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency. Ms. Paul is the editor of the Book Review. Credit...

Citus scales out Postgres for a number of different use cases , both as a system of record and as a system of engagement. One use case we’re seeing implemented a lot these days: using the Citus databa

Daniel Ellis (u/daniel) Senior Software Engineer Performance matters . One of the first tools we as developers reach for when looking to get more performance out of a system is caching. As Reddit has

Years ago Citus used to have multiple methods for distributing data across many nodes ( we actually still support both today ), there was both hash-based partitioning and time-based partitioning. Over

How we reduced error rates, and dropped latencies across merchants’ flows Reading Time: 6 Minutes Shopify merchants trust that when they build their stores on our platform, we’ve got their back. They

Clifford Oravec Follow Oct 28, 2016 · 17 min read Welcome to no man’s land. No co-founders. No funding. No connections. No customers. No — you’re not nuts. But First, a Digression… Are you like me and

Tim Soulo (CMO @ Ahrefs) May 3, 2018 · 10 min read I checked the time: 9pm. I’d just finished writing (what I thought was) my best article to date. Following countless hours researching, polishing my

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them a

On Friday, we announced DNS analytics for all Cloudflare customers. Because of our scale –– by the time you’ve finished reading this, Cloudflare DNS will have handled millions of DNS queries –– we had

When Segment’s VP of Growth, Guillaume Cabane, first began automating his company’s outbound email campaigns, he expected two things to happen. First, because humans would no longer be a bottleneck, h

Update from May 29, 2018: Today, we published Z-order indexing for multifaceted queries in Amazon DynamoDB: Part 2 . TL;DR Using Z-order indexing , you can efficiently run range queries on any combina

A few weeks ago I gave the Day 2 opening keynote at PerconaLive, a conference focused on Open Source Databases. My talk, titled “The Open Source Business Model is Under Siege,” is about the existentia

I was recently shopping online for shoes. Simple thing: pick a model and a size, enter my address and pay for them. Well, not always simple. Do you know this kind of online store where checkout feels

A question I get asked a lot is, “What tools would you recommend for my workflow?” I get it. In SaaS there are a ton of great tools to help you with every aspect of your business—from CRMs to project

Louis Grenier Sep 27, 2017 · 11 min read When you treat people the way you’d like to be treated, cool things happen… Most of the so-called marketing “influencers” out there are celebrities. They’ve ma

Back in April we announced Rate Limiting of requests for every Cloudflare customer. Being able to rate limit at the edge of the network has many advantages: it’s easier for customers to set up and ope

TL;DR: the most productive development happens when one person knows the system intimately because they wrote it; this is in conflict with growing a system beyond what one person maintains. Let’s talk

Jason Coudriet Follow Jun 3, 2017 · 11 min read If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. — John Quincy Adams This quote has inspired me thro

arodland Dec 19, 2016 · 9 min read We run Vimeo’s dynamic video packager, Skyfire, in the cloud, serving almost a billion DASH and HLS requests per day. That’s a lot! We’re very happy with the way tha

The fundamental challenge of computer system performance is for your system to have enough power to handle the work you ask it to do. It sounds really simple, but helping people meet this challenge ha

Entertainment, like friendship, is a fundamental human need; it changes how we feel and gives us common ground. We want to entertain the world. If we succeed, there is more laughter, more empathy, and

Evolution of data structures in Yandex.Metrica Monday, September 18, 2017 at 8:56AM Yandex.Metrica is the world's second largest web analytics system. Metrica takes in a stream of data representing ev

Edgestore is the metadata store that powers many internal and external Dropbox services and products. We first talked about Edgestore in late 2013 and needless to say, much has happened since. In this

Venture-backed startups have used direct sales for a long time. Read any Jason Lemkin post and sales are part of the standard playbook. Raise capital, hire a sales team, get a list of leads, and dial

Liveblog by Beyang Liu ( @beyang ) Alan Shreve is an hacker, entrepreneur and creator of ngrok.com. ngrok is the best way to connect expose services behind a NAT or firewall to the internet for demos,

Congratulations! Your company is growing and you’ve hired a great team. They’ve helped take your fledgling idea and make it more than just a reality, but a bonafide business with revenue that requires