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Hurricane Sandy puts YAGNI to the test

November 13, 2012

On Sunday night, Oct 29th, we learned that most US equities markets would be closed the next day due to Hurricane Sandy. This is very unusual: the only times the market has been closed since the four days following 9/11 have been the National Days of Mourning following the deaths of Presidents Reagan and Ford,… Read more

Deploying With a Phone Call: Speech Recognition in a Java backend

November 11, 2011

We had a lot of fun playing with last week’s experiment. However, it became quickly obvious that clicking on a button next to the service you want to deploy is much more convenient than talking to your web browser. Could we take the experiment further and build something that’s actually useful? Well, we all knew… Read more

Slides for my DevOps Talk at Box.net

April 07, 2011

Tuesday night I gave a talk at Box.net for the DevOps crowd. It was a lot of fun and folks seemed to enjoy it. Mostly it was about being a lean startup and the code we’ve written to stay lean. I’ve uploaded my slides to Slideshare if you’re interested: Scaling(?) at Wealthfront View more presentations… Read more

Write Internal Tools: Business in the Front, Party in the Back

February 14, 2011

If you find yourself fortunate to work for a company that values your time as a commodity too precious for repetitive and boring tasks (see #6 of wealthfront’s values), then your team will hopefully dedicate significant time not only on the great features you offer your customers, but also on developing the tools that help… Read more

IRC bots for Laziness, Impatience, and Continuous Deployment

December 10, 2010

1988 was an epic year. Not only were the movies “Die Hard”, “Coming to America” and “The Naked Gun” released, but according to Wikipedia, IRC was invented. A tried-and-true technology, constantly reincarnated in similar (perhaps inferior?) forms, IRC is a superb communications hub for a company because it affords so many things: Everyone can chat… Read more

Complement TDD with MDA

January 10, 2010

Test Driven Development (aka TDD) is on the rise. Good developers understand that code with no proper testing is dead code. You can’t trust it to do what you want and its hard to change. I’m a strong believer in Dijkstra’s observation that “Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence… Read more