In this day and age where web apps can be built in a day and released to millions, it’s vitally important that we leave time to consider the implications our products have on the world. I’m thankful that the folks at Outside Lands took notice and cared enough about their fans’ privacy to review and improve their Lost & Found web site when I wrote a
My wonderful grandmother Mary passed away last week. She was a beautiful person, filled with so much love for all. My sister and I are putting together a slideshow to play during the memorial service, filled with pictures of her and my grandfather’s life together. It’s really wonderful how easy Dropbox has made it to compile photos from various family members. Photos are one thing,
At a recent conference, I spoke with an engineer who confided in me that the well-known tech company he works for is having an "innovation crisis", where everyone is brilliant and works hard, but progress towards launching new features seems slow and uninspired. So I asked him: what's your hiring process? He answered with the mantra we've all heard before: "we hire the best and
A superstar engineer with a bad attitude can place more drag on your engineering org than they put in, which is why I like to focus my interviews on attitude and culture. Naturally, the candidate is on their best behavior, so how do you break down these barriers and see what they’re really like? Let’s play a board game! A lot of us at Sincerely enjoy
My wife and I got married 2 years ago today. It’s been a wonderful ride! Looking back, one decision that’s worked out well for us is how we manage our finances. As I think it’s a model that could work well for most couples, improving both happiness and financial health, I wanted to tell you about it. I subscribe to the notion that marriage is
When it comes to growing the productivity of a software engineering team, I believe there are four basic types of engineers: Adders, Subtracters, Multipliers, and Dividers. I find this framework helpful during hiring as well as determining when to let someone go. Adders are your standard, talented engineers. They learn and grow over time, striving to improve themselves and their code. They add to your team’s productivity
Continuous integration as a development practice already feels pretty magical. Imagine writing code and then deploying it to production in one seamless step, all the while knowing that your tests have run and your application is good to go. Until recently, continuous integration was one of those dev tool nice-to-haves that we hadn’t quite found time to implement. That day changed when we came across CircleCI:
Server security doesn’t need to be complicated. My security philosophy is simple: adopt principles that will protect you from the most frequent attack vectors, while keeping administration efficient enough that you won’t develop “security cruft”. If you use your first 5 minutes on a server wisely, I believe you can do that. Any seasoned sysadmin can tell you that as you grow and add more
As I write this, some guy in Florida is using stolen credit cards to successfully steal tens of thousands of dollars of products from us. Or at least, that’s what he thinks he’s doing. When someone steals, buys, or generates a credit card number with the intention of committing purchase fraud, the typical first step is determining if the card is valid. A stolen number
I clearly don’t need to expound on the benefits of master-slave replication for your MySQL database. It’s simply a good idea; one nicety I looked forward to was the ability to run backups from the slave without impacting the performance of our production database. But the benefits abound. Most tutorials on master-slave replication use a read lock to accomplish a consistent copy during initial setup. Barbaric! With