Managing a Google Analytics account for a large site with a long tail of content can be frustrating. In my experience, the biggest reasons are sampling and the dreaded 50,000 limit where GA only reports on your first 50k URLs hit each day, lumping everything else into an “(other)” bucket. While you can make both problems… 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
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
Much has been written on how to debug production memory leaks in Java, so rather than go into the nitty-gritty of how to comb through the heap, I thought I’d just highlight a couple of interesting points that came up as we were working on the issue… Note that this is based on an experience… Read More
Senior software engineers are expensive, and good ones can be fantastically productive. With the right support and environment, a good engineer can do great things, and with a dysfunctional environment, even the best engineers fail. I’m not talking about beanbag chairs, espresso machines, and onsite massages. Great engineers love to make things, so 80% of… Read More
Back in March, while everyone was waiting for the new iPad with bated breath, we heard rumblings of a 3rd-generation Apple TV. We’re always trying to find new ways to wow our users, and creating a dual-screen AirPlay experience with Apple TV seemed like a great opportunity to do just that. In the last major… Read More
Let’s talk about power search. Redfin currently offers over thirty ways to filter your search, but it seems that no matter how many options we provide, there will always be someone out there who wants more. Here’s a sampling of the kinds of emails we regularly receive in our Tech Support inbox: “I would like… 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
For many years, Redfin has used Postgres for storing all of the data that backs the main redfin.com site. Until early this year, we were running on Postgres 8.4, but as the the Postgres folks continued to add exciting features to the 9.x line, we became more and more eager to make the jump. First,… Read More