Skip to main content

Where's Greg?

It's been almost two years since I posted anything here. In late 2015, things got really busy for me at Recruitics and, to be totally candid, maybe I wasn't sure what this blog is for.

What happened since late 2015?

My department moved offices. Twice. We weathered a round of layoffs and rebuilt the teams that were affected. And we've made a ton of progress improving our applications and data processing. I joined Twitter. I became the solo developer of a new integrations platform that now handles over 30% of our data collection traffic and cost tracking. And in two months we launch a free analytics product that will change the competitive landscape in online job advertising.

So ... there's been a lot going on for me.

What's next for this blog?

My original purpose for this blog was to contribute something that other software engineers might find useful. I posted a few technical commentaries on topics not well-covered elsewhere, and I wrote somewhat haphazardly about my experiences as an engineering manager. The blog never really got much attention or traffic; in retrospect I realize I am better at writing software than blogging.

I believe my original goal was good, and I'm going to give it another go. This time I am going to try to be more consistent about topics and content. And I'm going to be more open-minded and less judgmental about what this blog becomes. Happy reading!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ReactJS, NPM and Maven

I'm just starting to get into working with ReactJS, Facebook's open source rendering framework. My project uses SpringBoot for annotation-driven dependency injection and MVC. I thought it would be great if I could use a bit of ReactJS to enhance the application. If you're looking for a basic conceptual intro, I recommend ReactJS for Stupid People and of course the official documentation  is quite good. In full disclosure, I still have no idea how to do "flux" yet. As an experienced Java backend developer, I'm pretty decent at hacking Maven builds - which is precisely what this blog post is going to be about. First, a word about how React likes to be built. Like many front-end tools, there is a toolkit for the node package manager (NPM). From the command prompt, one might run npm install -g react-tools  which installs the jsx command. The  jsx  command provides the ability to transform JSX syntax into ordinary JavaScript, which is precisely what I want...

AWS S3 versus CloudFront Performance

Yesterday I took Amazon CloudFront for a spin. Creating the CloudFront distribution was pretty simple - the wizard process flowed nicely. I found myself relying on the help text in places, but the most surprising thing was how long it took for the distribution to become enabled. I didn't time it exactly, but I probably spent 45 minutes waiting for my new CloudFront distribution to change from "In Progress" to "Enabled" status. The performance is a bit confusing. Compared to the S3 bucket, I didn't see any improvement in performance in a few tries - in fact, the CloudFront CDN performance was worse than the S3 bucket on its own for my 217 KB image file. I decided to take a larger sample, loading the same image 30 times in Chrome and noting the timing data from the "network" tab in the developer tools. I'm located in Brooklyn, have CloudFront configured for the US/Europe with download mode configured. My S3 bucket is in the US Standard zone, w...

Spark Cassandra Connector Tip

We're using Databricks as our provider for Spark execution, and we've been struggling to get the Spark Cassandra connector to work outside of the local development environment. The connector was attempting to connect to 127.0.0.1 even though we were passing the new host information into the getOrCreate(..) call. After working with Ganesh at Databricks support, we figured it out. The realization is that in Databricks, calls to getOrCreate() from a fat jar don't create a new SparkContext object. Thus, the configuration passed in gets ignored. If you want to update the Cassandra host information for the connector, you must update it after  the call to getOrCreate() instead. Add the configuration directly to the context and you'll be good to go!