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
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
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
tl;dr: If you’re using the CMS collector in Java 6 (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC) server-side, then you should really consider -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled Today’s post starts out with a story. You might have heard a similar story before. It begins with a handful of servers in a datacenter that just…. pause sometimes. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or… Read More
(This post assumes you have some familiarity with Google Spreadsheets) For CSV files that are unprotected, Google Spreadsheets provides a really handy function: importData(url). There’s a short description of it in the list of Google Spreadsheet functions. If you just use this lovely function in cell A1 and pass it the URL of a CSV file, you’ll… Read More
To kick off our San Francisco series of engineer-to-engineer lectures on new technologies and interesting problems in consumer software, we invited in the Great Alex Payne to talk about how Twitter uses Scala, a programming language that combines traits of object-oriented languages and functional languages with an eye toward supporting concurrency better in large-scale software…. Read More