In 2015-2016, the Parse.ly team embarked upon the task of re-envisioning its entire backend technology stack. The goal was to build upon the learnings of more than 2 years delivering real-time web content analytics, and use that knowledge to create the foundation for a scalable stream processing system that had built-in support for fault tolerance, … Continue reading Shipping the Second System
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a classic computer science text written by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. It is widely known in the computer science community as the “wizard book”. It intends to teach the foundations of computer programming from “first principles”, illustrating programming language design using Scheme, a dialect … Continue reading Expanding my mind, once more, with functional programming
Over the years, I’ve put together a few public technical talks where the slides are accessible on this site. These are only really nice to view on desktop, and require the use of arrow keys to move around. Long-form notes are also available — generated by a sweet Sphinx and reStructuredText plugin. I figured I’d … Continue reading Public technical talks and slides
Note: This post was written on August 17, 2017. I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia at the time; I had been based there since 2011 and would end up living there until 2019. Unfortunately, 5 days before this post was written, a tragedy happened in my town. This was my attempt to provide an alternative … Continue reading Charlottesville tech: a community that won’t be stopped by tragedy
Note from the future: this post written in November 2016. A lot has happened to Twitter (or, Twitter/X) since then. But, the fundamental analysis of Twitter’s growth dynamics outlined in this post continues to hold true even 8+ years later. Twitter is the public Internet company everyone loves to hate these days. It’s not growing. … Continue reading The Twitter growth conundrum
My first computer did not have a web browser. But I remember using my first web browser (Mosaic) with some awe. It was the late 90’s and though the web was not nearly as beautiful or functional as it is now, it worked. It was clear — even to my young self — that there … Continue reading Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters
Data engineers should abstract their code in the most lightweight way possible to facilitate downstream integration in a large-scale data system. You want lego blocks, not puzzle pieces. The creators of the C programming language once famously said, “first make it work, then make it right, and, finally, make it fast.” This adage still applies … Continue reading Simple Lego Blocks for Big Data
I realize now that one of the hardest parts of running a successful startup is “betting” on tech stacks that, 3 years out, will have a groundswell of community support around them. It’s still shocking to me that when I chose each of the following technologies as a central part of Parse.ly, they were so … Continue reading Picking tech stacks
I wrote this to a friend five years ago, a few weeks after I had quit my job to embark on the crazy ride that has been Parse.ly’s founding story. You said to me, “I am glad that you left because you sounded unhappy there.” But you know, I wasn’t exactly unhappy. I was just … Continue reading 5 years ago, I was bored
There’s some hoopla lately about “weird” startup names in the Wall Street Journal, with specific coverage of “.ly” domains in The Atlantic Wire: The latest start-up boom has led to the creation of at least 161 companies that end in “ly,” “lee,” and “li,” which is, naming consultants tell us, 160 too many. There’s feedly, … Continue reading Parse.ly: brand hacking
