One of the major perks of working on the engineering team at Redfin is the privilege to take on side projects in addition to the day-to-day assignments. We call it our “quarterly objectives,” where each quarter, engineers or product managers are allowed to dedicate a portion of their time to projects that they’re passionate about…. Read More
Improving performance is awesome. As a web developer, there is a unique satisfaction knowing a page now loads in half the time, or spends less time accessing databases. However, improving a page takes time; time that could have been spent making new features or wowing the user in more obvious ways. In addition, optimizing pages… Read More
Viewing the World Through Red-Colored Glasses If you’re a frequent visitor to our site, you may have noticed something different about the page today. After years of living with a blue color scheme we affectionately called “cadaver blue”, we’ve finally gone and put the “red” into Redfin. The new look is just the latest —… Read More
After a very successful night of hosting the Seattle Scalability Meetup few weeks back, we decided to host another one! This time, we hosted the Seattle JS Meetup. Just like last time, we had an incredible turnout from the Seattle community, with more than 100(!!) attendees sitting in our newly renovated office. This time, we started off… Read More
If you’re new to Web development, I highly recommend learning how to use a few different browser’s developer tools. I came from a background of mostly Java, and learning javascript can be tricky since it is used is such a different way. I used Chrome’s developer tools to learn how javascript behaves. I think it… Read More
Redfin Engineering had an incredible time hosting the Seattle Scalability Meetup earlier this week. In the past, we’ve had celebrity guest speakers give talks in our San Francisco office, but we’ve just never been able to make it happen in Seattle before. (If you’re curious, see Ryan Dahl on node.js, Alex Payne on how and why… Read More
Kelsey, a Product Manager (PM) intern here at Redfin over the summer, took a non-traditional approach to writing about her summer internship – she created a mock-up. We’ve been sitting on it for months while we published posts by other interns describing their impact, their pre-Redfin identity crises, past lives in biostatistics, and how there’s… Read More
Using the Eventbrite API to automate email promotions At Redfin, the Marketing team contacts customers all over the country about upcoming classes and events near them. We don’t send a lot of email to each recipient – nobody likes spam – but we do send a great deal of small campaigns each week, and… Read More
A while ago, we updated our mobile app to be compatible with iOS 6 and iPhone 5. While we were working with the latest Xcode that comes with SDK 6, we found a strange behavior in MKMapKit’s regionThatFits method. In MKMapView, a region is an area defined with a lat/long coordinate as the center and a span… Read More
Here at Redfin, we undertook a rather large project to redesign one of our most visited pages: the details of a home. This was no easy task but one of the main choices we made early on in the redesign was to fully embrace javascript for handling all of our view code. While this approach… Read More