Working with Eric is, I imagine, akin to preparing dinner with a sushi master chef. He is one of the most confident developers, and rightly so. I have learned more from him in the last year than any other on our team. Eric’s not content with his current abilities, though - he is constantly seeking new challenges and paradigms to test.
Cory is as earnest as he is steadfast. He is as honest as he is pragmatic. We built a team together, around the ideals we share. We set out goals a year in advance and completed them in half the time. I would work with him again, and I would recommend him to guide a project in any climate.
Out of all the engineers I have known, Colleen is the most structured and economical. While working together, she has grown tenfold in her abilities and her assertiveness. She would be a valuable asset to any group, both her technical skills and her personality.
Working at an e-commerce startup, I get asked to implement new tracking features every day. I built out the integration points for Google Analytics, Google’s retargeting pixel, Google’s conversion pixel, Facebook’s retargeting pixel, Facebook’s conversion pixel, Facebook’s Audience pixel (and here is where I run out of breath). That’s not even a complete list.
I love all my bookmarks. None of them actually go to any websites, though. They’re all bookmarklets.
Update: After a request by Jason Humphrey, I’ve released this implementation as a standalone NPM module: mongo-throttle.
Eric did a great thing in the past two weeks with his implementation of data calculating MySQL tables. In short, he wrote a table definition that updates itself on the hour by recalculating its own columns and records by determining the accrued new data and then summing and saving rows for each of our customers. Think of it as a preemptive cache that only has as much overheard as what has accrued in the last hour, with the added benefit of being entirely contained within our MySQL table definitions.
A list of things I did yesterday instead of writing a thoughtful piece here:
I need to be there at 8, and it should take ten minutes to drive there. I request an Uber at 7:40. On the map displayed within their application, the cars disappear as I make the request. They were lies! I wait five minutes for the driver that accepted. The driver is lost and he calls me for directions. I wait another ten minutes. The driver was directed to the wrong location by his Uber application. I give up and walk the block to where he is, because he is still lost. He is driving an old truck. He drives me to the wrong entrance to the building, again only because he was directed there by Uber itself. Luckily, I make it inside.
I was thinking today of how there’s a benefit to having a tiny side project. I hope most people do. I have quite a few, but one in particular has been useful to me. I have broken out Narro into microservices from the beginning, and one of those is the podcast feed generator service.
I was making robots.txt and humans.txt files for Narro recently, and I wanted to find a few unique examples. I was looking for something that included more than the boilerplate code from humanstxt.org. I think that the humans.txt file should be place for a bit of expression. I think rigid structure should be avoided. Please send me any others, but here are the interesting ones I found:
I’ve seeing a trend with some of the start up companies I’ve worked at. It tends to happen that a prolific and available customer drives the majority of revenue or traffic. That’s all well and good but what usually happens is that one (or two) customers start making decisions in their best interest. Who can blame them?
In the first week of the available iOS app, the Narro community nearly doubled in size.
I just pressed the button to submit Narro for iOS into the App Store. After 12 revisions, 3 weeks of testing, and 15 external beta testers, I think it’s ready to go.
From Jack Dorsey’s re-introduction as CEO of Twitter today:
I wake up between 6:30 and 7:30. This can happen before an alarm or after sleeping straight through two. It depends more on the day before than the night before.
At ThreadMeUp, we do much of our image manipulation and generation using HTML5 Canvas objects. This allows us to build some interesting tech, like mirroring client-side interactions with the canvas onto a Node server representation.
We’ve brought on two engineers in the last four weeks, and aiming to keep up the pace. I’m constantly reminded of how valuable new hires can be. The person can be senior, green, front-end, back-end, local, or remote. All that needs to happen is open communication and clear on-boarding. The new member’s point of view will take care of the rest.
I’ve sent these thoughts & instructions to friends more than once, so I should probably write them down.
