Disqus - Latest Comments for kellan

Re: Fifty Three

kellan — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 17:40:26 -0000

Late on the happy birthday wishes as we were also out at Sag Harbor this week introducing baby girl to the beach. Hope it was a great birthday, sounds like it was

Re: Locked Down Endpoints

kellan — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 17:28:52 -0000

Fred, if you want to play with a Firefox OS device before your phone arrives, we've got a couple of them in the device lab at EtsyHQ that we've been actively testing with.

Re: Writing As a Competitive Advantage

kellan — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:04:39 -0000

Etsy Ops team, which is largely distributed, has writing as a key component of the interview.

As more teams get distributed we're definitely ramping it up.

Important though to tease out the ability to write well from the ability to tell a story which I also think is a key success factor for software teams.

Re: How Etsy Increased Its Number of Female Engineers by a Multiple of Four in One Year

kellan — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:54:05 -0000

Glad you liked the talk, two points which I think you inverted.

> First, they found that saying that they were interested in increasing the diversity of their staff was absolutely a selling point to potential employees

Actually we found just saying it was kind of useless. We found that doing something that *proved* it was exciting to everybody.

> Additionally, they often found that many of the female candidates they looked at, while qualified in every other respect, fell behind their male counterparts in actual industry experience,

This is very much not what we found. What we found was that the female candidates we talked to had as much experience as their male counterparts and were generally awesome, but we couldn't convince them to come work for us. So we had to get creative about where we found candidates who would come work for us.

Re: Handmade Desks, "Breathing Rooms," And Gross Happiness: Take A Look Inside Etsy HQ

kellan — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 20:58:18 -0000

We roll our own. Most of our dashboards are built on tops of StatsD, a tool we open sourced that itself is built on top of graphite.

You can pick up StatsD, as well as a simple framework for laying out the dashboards at:
https://github.com/etsy

A bit more details at:
http://codeascraft.etsy.com...

Re: Why I love New York City

kellan — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:10:32 -0000

Salons only for curly-haired *people*, they also cut boys' hair, I know :)

Re: Sharing My Kindle Highlights

kellan — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 09:37:49 -0000

They're clearly *trying* to build something around this. The recent upgrade to the Kindle experience includes public profiles, following, etc, see: https://kindle.amazon.com/p...

But I'm not sure that social objects are really in Amazon's blood.

In theory this is where http://findings.com/ comes in.

Re: Win a Trip to Brazil During the NERBC

kellan — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:04:50 -0000

Looks awesome. You going all 3 days?

Re: SCHED Mobile Maps for SXSWm

kellan — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:52:00 -0000

Looks awesome.

Re: The Office Matters

kellan — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:53:06 -0000

Actually PHP isn't something we ended up with for historical reason, or backwards thinking, it's an active bet on the future.

Once you're working beyond non-trivial scales complexity is your greatest threat. It significantly raises your operational costs, and impedes your ability to change quickly.

Everything we're doing at Etsy right now is focused on optimizing rapid execution, this includes:

* standardizing hardware, and moving away from functional partitioning
* branching in codes
* very very frequent small pushes (every 10 minutes or so)
* choosing today's solutions today
* building with well known tools with proven scaling track records.

In particular we're rapidly converting over to a variation on the architecture that powers both Facebook and Flickr.

And like Dan and Erik said, when day to day you're busy with building something great at scale, the purity of the language is largely a non-issue. (and if you are obsessing about the purity of your underlying tech that might mean it's time to find a project you're more passionate about!)

Re: Symbology

kellan — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:48:57 -0000

But it also has a canonical URI/URL that is intuitive and yet has clear provenance, e.g. google.com.

Additionally using something like DNS srv records (the metadata XMPP builds on) it would straightforward to add disambiguation as needed, without creating a centralized mapping service.

(this is distinct from, for example, the geographic identifiers space where we desperately need a concordance service)

Re: Symbology

kellan — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:34:22 -0000

How are these an improvement over URIs which are already a distributed, well understood identifier system?

Re: Code As Craft

kellan — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:24:20 -0000

We've been publishing a mix of articles, interviews, and API tips at the Flickr Code blog for a couple of years now.

http://code.flickr.com/blog/

A couple of recent good articles:

A piece of our no-branches-no-tests-deploy-from-trunk development methodology
http://code.flickr.com/blog...

What we've learned about i18n
http://code.flickr.com/blog...

A look at what *can* be done with MySQL (in the NoSQL vien)
http://code.flickr.com/blog...

The importance of fun
http://code.flickr.com/blog...

Also at the bottom of http://code.flickr.com we publish when our last deploy was and who was responsible for the changes that went out so you know who to yell at if Flickr ever breaks :)

Re: My first full day in NYC. (Scripting News)

kellan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:18:20 -0000

Congratulations and welcome. And you picked the best 'hood in the city. I'm typing this right now from a table at Think Coffee (248 Mercer St.), also make sure to check out Third Rail Coffee (240 Sullivan St)

Re: Why Flickr should do Realtime RSS (Scripting News)

kellan — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:55:19 -0000

A bit more detail on part of why it took us so long to launch the Twitter integration the short version being, "First we had to invent OAuth". (though I'll be the first to admit we were still slow after everything was in place)

http://laughingmeme.org/200...

Re: The only college major that matters

kellan — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:52:21 -0000

My experience in hiring is that a CompSci degree is in no way indicative of whether someone will be any good. CS degrees simply don't teach readily applicable for building a product. Coding teaches one to code.

The handful of people who can apply the advanced theory to everyday problems are a god send, but they nearly universally have advanced degrees, not an undergrad's understanding of Java.

What I've been really wish I had lately was a degree in Economics, not because I find the discipline particularly compelling but because those people have the best mathematical toolset around for dealing with Big Data.

Similarly I wish a few more of the coders I worked with had any sort of formal background in aesthetics or business in order to help them more successfully weigh cost-benefit.

Re: The cloud is a powder keg

kellan — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:33:30 -0000

My mind immediately went to the money under the mattress metaphor as well. Banks have centralized the risk, and yet we still use them, for a combination of efficiency and security. In a world where everyone rolled their own security, home break ins would sky rocket.

And lets be clear, right now with technology startups 95% of them are in the hiding the money under the mattress stage. It's is only that much of the data is less liquid/desirable then money that has kept the relative rate of break in so low.

Security is something that you should never roll your own. You can get this by following best practices diligently, and ceaseless vigilance on your own hardware (I wonder if we could quantify "ceaseless" in terms of person/hour impact on a startup), or you can outsource it to the cloud.

Re: Why Flickr should do Realtime RSS (Scripting News)

kellan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:39:20 -0000

Slightly orthogonal, but you know that Flickr already offers a publicly available firehose for anyone to use? 3 of them actually.

http://www.flickr.com/servi...

Re: Blogging Verisimilitude

kellan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:18:19 -0000

Oooh, good catch on the Salon/Userland, I totally missed that.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

kellan — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:49:00 -0000

Dave, I know this is just an example you're using, but you do know there that photo already has a shorter URL, right? http://flic.kr/p/6LeeFL

Re: Tagging cache keys for O(1) batch invalidation

kellan — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:58:00 -0000

I realize this comment thread has already gone to hell and spam.

But assuming anyone is still reading, you might want to consider a technique by which you invalidate and re-build out of band or you're subject to a thundering herd problem.

Re: Streaming Kills Piracy

kellan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:22:08 -0000

Slightly off topic, but this blog post is showing ads for dianetics.org in the feed reader.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

kellan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:17:47 -0000

Thanks. Just another reminder I haven't done a good job of meeting the NYC techies.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

kellan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:53:04 -0000

Trying not to be offended, everyone else gets a name, and I get "Flickr article". Official Flickr blogs are here and here.

Re: How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data - Bret Taylor's blog

kellan — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:15:36 -0000

Mo, I think you've misunderstood what Bret means by different databases. Distinct database servers (real or virtual) with distinct IPs, and interfaces, etc. If you can join across those I'd be fascinated to see it. (though I doubt it would be much use in practice)