Evolution of Our Pagerduty Playbook: Fewer alerts, more uptime Since thousands of online businesses rely on Shippo to get shipping prices and print hundreds of shipping labels every second, we provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee. One of the major operations we recently overhauled is alerting for the engineering team. Healthy alerting helps our team maintain a good balance between moving fast and breaking nothing.… Read more
How we accidentally over-engineered seeding Memcached with Python, Redis and Celery If you’ve watched tv recently, you’ve perhaps seen the introduction to Elementary, the latest in a string of Sherlock Holmes inspired shows. The intro depicts a machine in which a series of events set off by a marble results in the caging of a figurine. Watching it, you might question the complexity of the events, but… Read more
Measure the Real Size of Any Python Object TL;DR: Use this script to measure sizes of objects in Python. This works for iterables, dicts and subclasses of Python’s built-in Object class. Edit: Thanks to those who contributed 🙂 Please feel free to submit pull requests for any edge cases you come across. A few months ago I suspected a global variable to… Read more
When and How to Refactor Code First off, if you haven’t heard of them already, allow me to introduce you to these popular rules of code optimization. Take a minute and check ‘em out. Those rules apply perfectly to code refactoring. So, before embarking on a journey that will cost you a few weeks worth of work, don’t, don’t yet,… Read more
5 Books Every Software Engineer Should Read Here are my fave 5, what are yours? Share them in the comments. 1. Scalability Rules A great book to fundamentally understand key concepts in planning and execution that will help you scale your product vertically and horizontally. It’s simple, short, and sweet. 2. Introduction to Algorithms My favorite rigorous algorithms book. This is my… Read more
#SeedStage Technical Recruiting: If You Think It Should Be Easy, Think Again Good engineers like BIG challenges. Challenging work – above all else – is what fuels them into the wee hours of the morning. The simple reason why: startups hit a point where their software will either be performing so well that there’s minimal work needed for maintenance or it’ll be performing abysmally, with no hope… Read more
