Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Don't be so sure of that. If your PIN just happens to start with 00, it is fairly trivial to jury-rig a common 4-digit hacking device to crack your 6-digit PIN.
Comment · 5 years ago
To add insult to injury, writing a press release like this (even including a screenshot with the very latest stuff) can feel just as good as actually shipping.

At this point, eclipsing the story of "the cool game that never shipped" with an actual game is a very high bar indeed.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Thank you very much for both your comment and link. This cleared things up for me.

It feels like an obvious oversight that there is not some company-wide Wiki to organize all of these docs. Since we are talking about Amazon/AWS, this has to be intentional. Can you speculate on why this gap exists?

Comment · 5 years ago
I was always interested in this but could not yet find deep resources on it.

Sadly the post skips over the format of these docs - is there a good resource for examples/templates of the different doc types (with comments?)?

Also, how are these documents shared and made discoverable internally? Do they refer to each other?

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Culture is what is there when you subtract work and manager. Defining a "good" culture depends on your personal work style, role, experience and general life priorities.

Interviews are much more of an art than science and asking good questions is hard. In general, they should be open-ended and get people out of their comfort zone to avoid canned answers. At the same time it's an interview, so you will want to leave on a positive note.

My advice would be to think of what is important to you at work. Then research about the company (maybe also by talking to current/past employees). In the interview, carefully probe for any red flags to confirm your suspicions. Personally, I'd go for things like work/life balance, WFH and career progression due to Covid, but that's very much up to you.

Comment · 5 years ago
I'd love to learn more about their canary rollouts. Is there any more info from either them or similar large sites about this?

For example, what usually has to happen for a dev to trigger a rollback? Or how do they handle stateful changes such as database schema changes?

Comment · 5 years ago
Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives.

I can highly recommend anyone to read about the process of medical emergency triage in general. It drastically reduces the knowledge needed to solve complex situations and gives you something to hold on to when things get hot. Seeing these stressful problems reduced to if-else flows was very inspirational for me for designing ways to tackle urgent issues in other areas of life, e.g. tech support, service requests or HR.

Comment · 6 years ago
Both are valid. It depends on the footprint, type of SaaS (e.g. running complex offline-processing vs running heavily customized web-shops), your PII regulations and your ideal customer type and size.

It can be easier to have custom subdomains running separate instances, since this will limit how outages/upgrades/security affect customers. You also can intentionally keep a customer on an old version, which can be a bug or a feature.

But it can also be easier to have tenants, since you can update all users at the same time and you will pay less overall for infrastructure.

Having done both, I personally prefer tenants since it's easier to write, support and scale. But if you're B2B, you should carefully investigate the other option.

Comment · 6 years ago
Can you comment on the kind of engineers that were interested in getting a job this way? Did you hire/interview any of them?
Comment · 6 years ago
Not nitpicky at all - this is an important distinction to highlight for pointy-haired decision makers.

This product is undoubtedly the P in PaaS, but there is no service behind it. If your company uses this as an alternative to a real Heroku/AWS/xyz PaaS, you must have engineers at hand for 24/7 ops, scaling servers and fixing bugs. In my opinion, this is quite risky for anything running in production and should not survive a cost-benefit analysis.

Comment · 6 years ago
Thanks for sharing. So no library for styling forms? Is all that styled by hand?

The site looks great.

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