An example of how we've decoupled systems in our real time bidding system to allow for degraded functionality vs systematic failure. | Continue reading
The large enterprise software companies really need to stop charging for support plans. | Continue reading
Stanford Medicine supposedly had a flawed algorithm that misallocated COVID vaccines. That may be true but we need to stop blaming the algorithm. | Continue reading
Amazon owns almost 110M IPV4 addresses. At the lower end of the market price this is over $2B. | Continue reading
I got subscribed to a Domino's UK marketing email and due to GDPR was unable to unsubscribe. | Continue reading
Apple announed the new MacBook Air heralding their return to building their own chips. Amazon is also building their own chips for the datacenters. Tough to not feel bad for Intel. | Continue reading
Similar to how neighbors feel comfortable retrieving lost balls from each others' yards engineers should feel comfortable working on others' code. | Continue reading
Rather than jump straight to the answer it's important to struggle so once you get the answer it has a place to nest. | Continue reading
AWS offers a variety of reservation options for the EC2 instances and a few things stand out when you compare them. | Continue reading
AWS gives a variety of ways to buy reservations and there are massive savings if you can understand your business. | Continue reading
One of my DigitalOcean instances got hacked by a crypto miner. The instance was insignificant but gave me the opportunity to poke around the code. | Continue reading
It's valuable to be able to go back to first principles when encountering new problems. Unfortunately, once you develop mastery you start relying on pattern recognition as a shortcut. | Continue reading
I've been meaning to write about management more but before I start I wanted to share some of the books and newsletters I've found valuable in my evolution. | Continue reading
The AlphaGo documentary was an incredible film - yet watching it really hit home that we're in a new era. | Continue reading
NJ is currently looking for COBOL programmers to update its unemployment software. Imagine this was open source and the community was able to contribute. | Continue reading
In my pursuit of quantifying more and more I now have a dashboard that tracks the amount of messages in my email inbox. | Continue reading
Zoom has been blowing up lately as the world moves to remote work. I'm curious what this is doing to their business, especially their margin. | Continue reading
In order to measure my performance against my 2020 blogging goals I set up a simple Grafana dashboard powered by MySQL | Continue reading
Despite the wealth of open source applications out there it's still difficult to find a good resource for optimal configurations. | Continue reading
As part of my parking spot finder project I compared Google's computer vision against Amazon's. | Continue reading
It should not be possible for companies to settle class action lawsuits through their own services. | Continue reading
To get my password manager working on mobile I set it up to work via SMS. | Continue reading
The online food delivery companies all add a markup to the restaurant's listed prices. | Continue reading
There are some parallels between Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the way we solve software engineering problems. | Continue reading
My approach to solving Num - a combinatoric math game where you have to combine numbers and operations to get to a desired value. | Continue reading
In order to get proper sorting of dates I had to change my Confluence settings to Polish. | Continue reading
Substack is a newsletter startup that recently received $15M of funding and I can't help but compare it with Medium. | Continue reading
We ran into an issue a few months ago that highlighted an unexpected behavior in DNS resolution and taught us a lesson. | Continue reading
A good tech internship project allows an intern to get a feel for the work and have an impact all while being autonomous. | Continue reading
Amazon has a button to add a book to a list and oddly enough it's in a different location for different products. | Continue reading
I read a ton and really enjoy reading about computer history. It's a recent field but it's always awe-inspiring to read about previous generations that laid the foundation for the digital age. | Continue reading
Remove unused code is important to keeping your code clean and maintainable. To do it properly you need to aggressively deprecate code. | Continue reading
It's too easy to find answers online to our coding problems but it's much better to take the time to solve it on your own locally before going online for help. | Continue reading
Google Calendar has been on a roll lately with the volume and quality of new functionality. | Continue reading