Interviews are weird. Of course there are the nuts and bolts – getting there early enough but not too early, dressing nicely but not too nicely, the technical and behavioral questions, and so on – but more interestingly, every so often someone asks you a question that really forces you to reflect seriously on your experience or worldview. […]
Author Archives: Dan
The plan had always been to go for an A round in April. We had a solid idea (personal shopping!), enough cash to carry us through June, a great set of investors (seriously, some very nice and sharp people), and, to the degree to which you can depend on these kinds of things, a solid expectation of […]
At TripAdvisor, the devops team managed about 400 physical servers spread across three server rooms. We ordered and provisioned new hardware, scavenged parts (and sometimes whole servers) from the live site teams, replaced hard drives, installed and upgraded OSes, rebooted, rewired, and were generally on call for all manner of problems. What a pain. I mean, seriously, […]
I’m a Java guy. Or rather, I’m a C++ guy who ended up in Java. I like statically-typed languages, and think it would be cool if Java had double pointers (or at least reference parameter types) and explicit memory deallocation. I spent the better part of a decade coding video games in C++, and twelve […]
It’s trite, but true – when I first started at HelloShopper (né Scratch), I was overwhelmed trying to come up to speed on a new company, new team, new commute, new set of technologies, new code base, new tools, new operational infrastructure, new risks, new, well… Everything. The existing team had put together a website […]
Note: This is the first post in a series of musings and reflections on my first year in startup-land. The most important goal for any manager is to ship product, and the highest leverage task toward that end is to build a great team. I’ve had the privilege of working in companies with great engineering […]
There’s this local restaurant I go to a lot – it isn’t much to look at from the outside, and truth be told, the inside is kind of dingy. The menu is a mess of misspellings and grammatical mistakes inside a cracked, yellowing plastic sleeve, orders sometimes get lost, and one of the waiters is actively […]
TripAdvisor has a fair amount of physical hardware, and one of the devops team’s responsibilities was to manage the hundreds of servers in the development environment. We provisioned new machines, retired old ones, replaced controller batteries, and constantly upgraded, added, and replaced hard drives. Working in an AWS stack means not having to deal with most of that any more (huzzah!), […]
Like peanut butter and chocolate, cut and tr are two great commands that go great together. cut provides an easy way to grab one or more fields from a line of text, and tr allows you to prepare the line first. Let’s start with cut. Consider the following directory listing: # ls -l total 5392 […]
I’m not a Linux guru. I’ve always known just enough to get the job done, but was never focused on getting deep into the command line for its own sake. Ever since joining the devops team at TripAdvisor almost two years ago, though, and more recently taking responsibility for operations at Scratch, I’ve had to learn a much broader array […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 