Categories
python ruby Technology

An open letter to SmugMug

TL;DR

SmugMug is great, but its developer ecosystem is, in my humble opinion, crumbling, and can use some serious love — or put out of its misery and die…

Dear SmugMug, there are lots of people, myself included, who want to see you thrive and succeed. People who are spending their free time, resources and energy on sharing their tools with the community. People who can build great things on top of SmugMug, and can make SmugMug even more successful than it currently is. Please don’t forget us. We are the potential evangelists, multipliers, and we do this for free. Please treat our free gifts with respect. These gifts might be free, but they are precious. They should be cherished, rather than ignored, or discarded.

Continue reading “An open letter to SmugMug”
Categories
optimization Performance rails ruby

The dark side of Rails Russian Doll Caching

Rails Russian Doll Caching is super cool. It’s simple, effective and makes caching much easier to reason about.

There’s a dark side to it though. Not in the negative, evil sense. But rather the hidden, unknown, confusing sense.

Continue reading “The dark side of Rails Russian Doll Caching”
Categories
iphone mobile Technology

The one (stupid) feature

My wife and I started using Amazon photos a while ago. I didn’t think that much of it first, but it was included with our Prime membership, and offered an automatic upload from our phones, plus free storage (for photos), so why not?

Fast forward a couple of years. We’ve since cancelled Prime, and I wanted to switch to Dropbox, which has comparable automatic upload, a mobile app, and superior sync with a proper linux client. But I couldn’t. Why? Because of this one (stupid) feature.

Which one?

Continue reading “The one (stupid) feature”
Categories
Technology

Why I’m not using Fastmail

Prepare for a somewhat ranty post, but it doesn’t come from a bad place. I honestly want Fastmail to succeed. I’m eager to see more alternatives for email hosting, and clients (and there are scaringly few).
I also acknowledge that some of the problems I bumped into are quite specific to my own setup, which isn’t common. So in some ways, it’s not about you, Fastmail. It’s me. Make your own judgement.

TL;DR – Fastmail is pretty neat, but their support sucks. Their support ticket system sucks even more, and their product is not clear enough to work without support. From my personal experience anyway.

Continue reading “Why I’m not using Fastmail”
Categories
monitoring optimization Performance python Technology

a scalable Analytics backend with Google BigQuery, AWS Lambda and Kinesis

On my previous post, I described the architecture of Gimel – an A/B testing backend using AWS Lambda and redis HyperLogLog. One of the commenters suggested looking into Google BigQuery as a potential alternative backend.

It looked quite promising, with the potential of increasing result accuracy even further. HyperLogLog is pretty awesome, but trades space for accuracy. Google BigQuery offers a very affordable analytics data storage with an SQL query interface.

There was one more thing I wanted to look into and could also improve the redis backend – batching writes. The current gimel architecture writes every event directly to redis. Whilst redis itself is fast and offers low latency, the AWS Lambda architecture means we might have lots of active simultaneous connections to redis. As another commenter noted, this can become a bottleneck, particularly on lower-end redis hosting plans. In addition, any other backend that does not offer low-latency writes could benefit from batching. Even before trying out BigQuery, I knew I’d be looking at much higher latency and needed to queue and batch writes.

Continue reading “a scalable Analytics backend with Google BigQuery, AWS Lambda and Kinesis”
Categories
monitoring optimization Performance python Technology

a Scaleable A/B testing backend in ~100 lines of code (and for free*)

(updated: 2016-05-07)

tip-toeing on the shoulders of giants

Before I dive into the reasons for writing Gimel in the first place, I’d like to cover what it’s based on. Clearly, 100 lines of code won’t get you that far on their own. There are two (or three) essential components this backend is running on, which makes it scalable and also light-weight in terms of actual code:

  1. AWS Lambda (and Amazon API Gateway) – handle the requests to both store experiment data and to return the experiment results.
  2. Redis – using Sets and HyperLogLog data structures to store the experiment data. It provides an extremely efficient memory footprint and great performance.

For free?

Continue reading “a Scaleable A/B testing backend in ~100 lines of code (and for free*)”
Categories
optimization Technology

AlephBet – javascript A/B Test framework for developers

I recently created AlephBet: a new javascript A/B Test framework, built for developers. This post tries to capture the motivation and some background for creating it in the first place, especially with so many commercial and open-source frameworks and services available for A/B testing.

Continue reading “AlephBet – javascript A/B Test framework for developers”
Categories
Technology

Stop showing me your homepage

I haven’t noticed it much before, but it’s becoming a pet peeve once I started paying attention to it.

We LOVE homepages. Like eyes being the key to our souls, our homepage shows who we really are. What we stand for. They turn random visitors to loyal customers. They inspire trust, build an emotional connection, they bind us together… ok ok. You got the picture. Homepages are great.

But once I’m sold. I’m in. I gave you my email. I’m a loyal customer. I go to your site every. single. day. Do I really need to see your homepage again??! Do I actually care that you changed the photo on the frontpage and highlighted another benefit to potential customers? Or most important – do I really have to click the ‘Login’, ‘Go to my app’, ‘Dashboard’ or whatever other link you give me to get started?

Continue reading “Stop showing me your homepage”
Categories
coffee optimization

Coffee A/B Tasting – Results

This is the final post on this series. I started by covering the method for A/B testing coffee, as well as the motivation and approach. I later wrote about the first test session using Hario V60, comparing those beans by making Espresso and the last post described two preparation methods Aeropress and Cappucino.

I repeated a similar process using various combinations of A, B, C, D and E coffee beans. This post will be more brief, with the “results” based on my personal preferences and how I ended up scoring all 5 types of beans.

Continue reading “Coffee A/B Tasting – Results”
Categories
coffee optimization

Coffee A/B Tasting – aeropressoccino

On previous posts I covered the method for A/B testing coffee, as well as the motivation and approach. I later wrote about the first test session using Hario V60. The last post was comparing those beans by making Espresso.

This post will cover two tasting sessions of the same mysterious A and B beans: Aeropress and Cappuccino.

Continue reading “Coffee A/B Tasting – aeropressoccino”