Easier Gamification with Badge-O-Matic
So you’ve already decided you want to reward your users for performing certain actions by giving them points and badges. Level up! But you’re stuck on the next step: “Now how do I make my stinkin’ badges?”
In our system, awarding the progressive badges as users hit different thresholds of activity used to require a little [...]
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The Strategic Importance of the Offensive Line
I often compare the offensive line to tech operations – the guys who keep our servers and systems running. As a small startup that prides itself in being nimble and quick with weekly sprints and product releases – the analogy to 5th grade tackle football feels somehow appropriate.
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Recovery Retrospect
We’ve developed a suite of automated system tests that amongst other things verify the integrity of our API to ensure that we don’t make any inadvertent backwards-incompatible changes, measure performance by entry-point, and detect unexpected increases in SQL query counts. These tests require removal of pre-existing data from the database, which is scripted and part of the entire process. There are two hosts that we run these tests against, but a new employee inadvertently ran them against our production database last Monday night (ironically, apparently national Roller Coaster Day), causing all data to disappear on both the primary and backup slave server. In addition, through a strange sequence of events our only good backup would have left us with around 8 days of missing data. Once reality set in, I went through a series of emotions and reactions that can’t really be described and I’d prefer never to experience again.
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BigDoor API service has been restored
We’ve just recovered from an extremely painful and embarrassing outage of our API. Because we love to embrace transparency, I figured I’d post the email that I sent to our customers earlier today.
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Update: BigDoor API is up! Please resume your usage.
Please note that we are currently missing historical transaction detail and leaderboards. All of the data has [...]
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Speed versus Quality
In a technology startup speed is very often the enemy of quality. I tend to prefer speed and thankfully our CTO tends to prefer quality. He is usually right. He has a strongly held belief that you can speed up by slowing down. There are a fair number of variations on this that I heard [...]