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
Depending on what you read, around a third of the time spent on mobile devices is taken up by email. Redfin is being increasingly accessed from mobile devices. It’s the 21st century, and we’ve all got computers in our pockets. This is a table-based, HTML email that we were sending a month ago. Why, then,… Read More
First off, let me disclaim one thing: I’m not a developer at Redfin. I’m actually just a member of the product management and design team. I have been a dev in my past life, but I’m rusty to say the least. Even though it’s not part of my job, I still love to code 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
Boilerplate code to wrap implementations of important JDBC interfaces Read More
wherein a Redfin engineer gives a little back, and gets even more in return 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
Internet Explorer 9 Beta sometimes gives the wrong answer when we ask for the size of the viewport (viewable area of the browser window). On an HTML document with “X-UA compatible” set to IE=7 and Windows font DPI set to 125% or 150% with the browser window maximized, IE9 claims the viewport is a few… 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