This past weekend I had the privilege of representing Redfin as a mentor at the PennApps 48-hour hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In addition to having sponsors help cover the cost of the event, PennApps invited companies to send along representatives to help answer questions that students might have during the competition…. Read More
Neil Armstrong’s gone. Let’s not let the spirit of Apollo die with him. A reporter once asked Neil Armstrong to comment on the conspiracy theory that the U.S. had faked his famous lunar landing. He chuckled and said that it didn’t bother him, “because I know that one day somebody’s going to fly back up… Read More
Update as of 22 Oct 2012 – the latest version of Eclipse Juno now saves toolbar state across application launches. Great news! The original blog post is preserved below. If you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Eclipse, you’ve probably noticed two things: the new UI is not particularly attractive more importantly, there’s no way… Read More
Multicontroller and Multiget: So recently we went through a redesign with one of our web pages. This was pretty cool because it gave us a chance to rebuild the architecture from ground up. We didn’t want to code super controllers, the kind that has too many lines of code and tries to do everything in… Read More
Coming from the C++ background into javascript programming was a fun ride. I read many blog posts and articles about javascript inheritance, and after reading it all I still felt I didn’t fully understand how javascript inheritance really works. I soon realized the hard truth: I’ll have to figure it out on my own. I… Read More
In the months leading to the launch of Redfin Open Book, we embarked in an ambitious data cleanup project. We had 7,500+ free-form text fields from which we needed to extract structured vendor information. We ended up with 3,000+ cleaned database records. In this post I’ll walk you through how we used MTurk, and share the lessons I learned from using it. Read More
Since Dec 2011 we’ve been storing a small portion of our data as JSON in Postgres. This blog post gives a quick overview of why we decided to do this, how it works, and what we’ve learned so far. Why JSON in Postgres? Redfin’s basic stack includes a Java-based web app on top of a… Read More
Stoyan is totally right and I’m totally wrong (see his comment below, which reads “The thing about google maps you load is that it’s an html page. When you load html page in object tag it’s as if you put it in an iframe. It includes all markup and extra css/js/img resources.”) My test was… Read More
In Dojo 1.4, the Dojo Toolkit team introduced a new “dojo.hash” library for managing the back button in AJAX applications. It’s a replacement for “dojo.back,” which was available in Dojo 1.0. If you’re deciding whether to use dojo.hash vs. dojo.back for your next web application, you should use dojo.hash. Background: Back Button in AJAX AJAX… Read More
Ryan Dahl, the creator of a high-performing web server written in JavaScript, came by Redfin’s San Francisco office to talk about his creation, Node.JS. It was a very funny, thoughtful talk, particularly because Ryan is somehow both opinionated and careful with the truth. He is the latest in a long line of speakers for Engineer-to-Engineer,… Read More