fourspace

Regardless of your views on Ayn Rand, this journalist goes to a week long conference and writes about two talks? Click bait. Pass.

However, features like mobile check depositing are only available to "qualified members" (i.e. those with a military connection).

Former Google SRE here. Trust me, many of the problems we faced were solved on whiteboards, during chats at lunch, or via email. Most of issues we faced were of a class that simply isn't covered on basic sites like Stack Overflow.

The interview described is pretty much exactly as I remember them. SRE is actually quite difficult to get into, precisely because you need to have fairly deep knowledge on a wide range of topics. The "ways in which you were asked to solve problems" are actually the best way to determine if an application actually knows about what they will need to know.

An extremely common use case is to have several google accounts, typically when using various Google Apps domains.

Instead of understanding that I'm the same person with access to all of the accounts, it makes me log into each one separately. For most products you can be logged into each one simultaneously, but the first one you log into is the "default". Analytics, for example, doesn't even support multi-login, so if that "default" account is not the one you want, you have to log out of ALL of them. WAT

Congrats. The irony is that the last thing I think of when I'm using Google's long-convoluted account management system is "slick login".

For us, it just worked. I'm a one-man engineering team at a startup, so I don't have the resources to devote to running an in-house CI setup. Circle took care of it for us, and their UI and features are just perfect.

Congrats to Paul and the rest of the team! I have been recommending CircleCI to all of my dev friends ever since my first experience with it over a year ago.

We had a pretty tricky front end testing setup with our Rails app, due primarily to some bleeding edge javascript interactions that needed to be tested in a headless browser. It took ages to get right locally, so I had zero confidence that Circle would handle it. I set up our repo and promptly forgot about, as I was traveling out to SF for Startup School 2012.

While waiting in the lobby of YC for the pre-event dinner, I got an email from Circle (actually, from Paul) that our repo was ready and all tests were passing. PASSING?! Whoa. As I read it, I looked up from my phone and Paul was standing in front of me. I wanted to give him a hug, but I settled for a friendly thank you and a handshake. =)

I certainly can't get it to work. For the first problem, I tried:

  function one_bit(x) {
    return x & (x-1) == 0
  }

Only to see this error:

  Expected "}" or comment but "&" found.

WAT

Agreed 100%. I was just touching the surface, and by "shipping" I really meant inventory management, purchase orders, and everything else involved in stocking physical goods.

It's clear the POS app is a test product for them, and I'm happy to see them experiment. I just wish they'd put a little more love into the core functionality. Even for ecommerce, Shopify is lacking some really basic things:

- Editing orders (e.g. marking an item canceled)

- Editing tracking numbers (fixing typos -- not allowed today)

- Allowing coupons to offer both a discounted price and free shipping (today they're mutually exclusive)

Great news. Shopify is the one piece of ecommerce software we use that isn't completely maddening. (Having a fantastic API is a large reason why.)

I was struck by this comment, though:

   "Using Shopify and Shopify POS together reveals our true 
   ambition: To be the first company in the world that fuses  
   all the distinct parts that are needed to run a complete 
   modern commerce business - all in one amazing product."

If anyone thinks they can run a complete business using only Shopify, they're sorely mistaken. It's only a shopping cart. If you want to actually ship items, you need to use one of their third-party apps or roll your own. Those apps are the reason that ecommerce with Shopify is still frustratingly difficult -- unnecessarily so.