Week 02 - 2016

So You Think You Can Program An Elevator

Many of us ride elevators every day. We feel like we understand how they work, how they decide where to go. If you were asked to put it into words, you might say that an elevator goes wherever it’s told, and in doing so goes as far in one direction as it can before turning around. Sounds simple, right? Can you put it into code?

This is an interesting test for all programmers. Can you do it in Node.js or Java?

Uptown Funk parody
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A Beginner’s Guide To Scaling To 11 Million+ Users On Amazon’s AWS

How do you scale a system from one user to more than 11 million users? Joel Williams, Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect, gives an excellent talk on just that subject: AWS re:Invent 2015 Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users.

Interesting blog post about AWS and scaling. The biggest take away is to always go for the MVP.

Here’s What Push Notifications Look Like When You Have 8M Followers On Instagram

Just for fun. Imagine if you had an Instagram account with eight million followers. Imagine if you switched push notifications on for your account.

Wow, this is cool!

Two weeks of rust

I spent about two weeks over the Christmas/New Year break hacking on emcache, a memcached clone in Rust. Why a memcached clone? Because it’s a simple protocol that I understand and is not too much work to implement. It turns out I was in for a really fun time.

This seems interesting. Maybe it’s time to investigate rust?

Why We Hire Great Developers, Not Great Mobile Developers

Our strategy at Runkeeper has been to hire great developers, not necessarily great mobile developers. Sure, if a great mobile developer comes knocking on our door we’ll take ’em, but that’s only happened once or twice. For the most part, we take it upon ourselves to train employees on the job.

Is it possible for great developers to make great mobile applications? I think so.