Not too long ago, Camille Fournier at Rent the Runway shared the software engineering ladder their team uses for promoting engineers within the development team. I thought I’d take the opportunity to share the ladders we use at Chartbeat and look at how you might structure a ladder for your startup. First, The Basics. A […] Keep reading
We’re back from a too-long hiatus! I know you missed us. One of our engineers has been nursing a casual interest in ionizing radiation over the past couple of hackweeks and decided to build a Geiger Counter from scratch. At the heart of this device is a component called a Geiger-Muller tube that facilitates the […] Keep reading
Centralized logging had been on our backlog for quite some time at Chartbeat.  After taking care of some yaks to be shaved, we got to implementing Logstash about a year ago.  We by no means have the largest cluster, averaging around 25k events/sec and peaking at 50k during backfills.  We’ll share some tips from what […] Keep reading
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About GAME BOY (but were too afraid to ask). This nearly 15 year old text file contains everything (and I mean everything) you ever wanted to know about the 1989 Nintendo Gameboy. The author gushes over it’s scrappy little z80 8-bit processor, the way it stores tiles in a single […] Keep reading
Pianist Kimiko Ishizaka open sourced her rendition of Bach. Ralf Rottman is a scrum curmudgeon. What’s more fun than writing Lisp? Writing games in Lisp, of course! Happy Friday! Keep reading
Back in 2014 I gave a presentation at PyGotham on a neat PostgreSQL feature called Foreign Data Wrappers. Because of a variety of factors, the presentation was a little unhinged, and I declined making it public in favor of a more detailed written up post, which I swore would appear just a couple weeks after […] Keep reading
Sometimes building the better product isn’t what you need for success. Sometimes all you need is a little gimmick that works well enough to get users in the door, and then let the product keep them there. Read about Google Maps’ origin story, and how it took some luck and a fun gimmick to make […] Keep reading
Michael Jordan, who co-authored the first paper on Latent Dirichlet Allocation, talks about the relationship between frequentist and Bayesian statistics. The New Yorker’s bio of Yitang Zhang, who recently proved the Bounded Gaps Conjecture — the most important mathematical discovery so far this decade. Tali Garsiel’s “How Browsers Work” is an epic exploration of the […] Keep reading
Feeling a little older? Maybe the universe didn’t start 13.8 billion years ago, maybe it was hanging around forever as a quantum potential waiting to make a big bang. Alvaro Videla schools us on the origin of harmful gotos and other programming myths. Happy Friday!   Keep reading
Schrodinger’s unlucky Cat can be alive! The Cat has been used to represent possible quantum states of a particle. In Schrodinger’s conceptual model, the unlucky Cat is placed in a container with a vial of cyanuric acid that breaks open if the container is opened. It is thus assigned both dead and alive states since […] Keep reading