Blog archive, page 91

A quick engineering-related post: we built a cache plugin for Play that uses capped collections in Mongo. It's available on Github if you'd like to use it.

We recently added a feature to Domino that lets you spin up an interactive R session on any class of hardware you choose, with a single click, enabling more powerful interactive, exploratory work in R without any infrastructure or setup hassle. This post describes how and why we built our "R Notebook" feature.

As I've evolved from being an individual software developer to managing teams and starting a company—a data science platform—I continue to notice parallels between the principles of good engineering and the principles of good management. I have no delusions of novelty here but it's an interesting topic with a lot of surface area, so I plan to write more about this over the coming months. For now, I want to focus on one specific similarity: situations where "someone" is unable to do what has been asked of them.

We recently hired a Head of Marketing, and one of the bigger challenges in doing so surprised me: many candidates expressed serious concern about our having bootstrapped the company rather than using the more traditional venture capital-backed approach. I thought our approach was better, faster, smarter – but that’s not what many candidates saw.