The featured post template is the flagship template in the Kinja ecosystem- it provides editors with a suite of tools to present their long-form journalism in visually stunning fashion. On the Kinja tech team, we want these posts to shine as brightly as possible, while still providing opportunity for monetization. The…
TL;DR by removing redundant data, we reduced our Amazon Redshift costs by over 80%.
In an effort to get better at working with Kinja’s backend codebase (which is largely in Scala), a group of us at FMG have been taking the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera. So far I’m having a great time!
I know there’s already a lot of content out there about category theory, Monads and stuff like that, but I always felt that all this knowledge is a bit fragmented or too wordy for me: there are aspects that are not described in one or the other, so it never felt like I could put the whole puzzle together based on one…
According to Odersky, Scala is an acronym for “scalable language”, meaning it allows the language to change into whatever use you see fit. This is true to some extent; for example though Scala’s subtyping system is unsound, you can “expand” the language to make a better one. Of course it would be preferable for the…
I came across Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) a couple of years ago.
Apache Spark comes with the built-in functionality to pull data from S3 as it would with HDFS using the SparContext’s textFiles method. textFiles allows for glob syntax, which allows you to pull hierarchal data as in textFiles(s3n://bucket/2015/*/*). Though this seems great at first, there is an underlying issue with…
Last week I attended the Craft Conference in Budapest with 9 others engineers from Kinja. It was a really good conference about Software Crafting, with great surrounding, organisation and talks. The organisation had four different type of rooms which allowed you to go to the talk which is the most interesting for you.
There’s a trending topic at conferences every year. At last year’s Craft Conference a lot was about functional programming, with some hints of distributed systems, devops, and some really good talks about what’s it like beeing an evolving engineer. As it was pointed out in one of the talks, the thing that are in the…
Facebook grows more distant from its origins as a simple social network every year. This week’s F8 developer conference made very clear (if it wasn’t enough already) that the company is now a globe-spanning octopus with tentacles in every pie. F8 topics of discussion included virtual reality, Messenger, giant…
We've surpassed the age of "mobile first" and entered that of "mobile best," or at least this was the buzzy mantra of choice at New York's stop on the traveling #TwitterFlock tour. Kickstarting our iOS training efforts, Diego, Casey and I attended Twitter's conference to learn more about their new mobile toolset, …
We love animated GIFs. Really love animated GIFs. The only problem with our love of animated GIFs is how unnecessarily wastefully large the files are. For example, if you load up Sploid, at the moment of writing this post 15 of the 20 displayed posts contain a GIF, each weighing at least 2 MB: a full pageload is 32…
What would happen if I opened someone's Kinja in my browser, and started to click the follow / unfollow button in rapid succession? What if I opened the same page in another tab, and somehow did the same thing there too? Can I actually expect the displayed follower count or follower list to show the same values in…
This year's Scala eXchange conference in London was opened by Martin Odersky's keynote who talked about his recent efforts to overcome binary compatibility problems that has been around in Scala ever since it became popular.
This past Thanksgiving week, the tech and product team at Gawker got to spend a few days hacking before the holidays. My team — Stephen Kao, Robin Stice and Ali Philippides — collaborated on a content discovery prototype modeled off of the wildly popular dating app, Tinder. Let us introduce you to, Kindr.
Together with Alex, Keki and Zoli I had the chance to attend this year's Stretch Conf. In short, it's a 2-day "leadership and management conference", but I'd recommend it to everyone interested in self-motivation, self-consciousness, self-organization and related fields. It was an inspiring event. Therefore, I decided…
The keynote by David Allen was excellent. He was basically talking about the contents of his book Getting Things Done. He claims to be a lazy person and probably most of us are. But not for everyone means this a drive to become more efficient, more productive. By using the right techniques, you can use this…
On October 22, we changed the format of one of our platform-wide cookies. The conversion process is pretty simple: we check for the old cookie, use it to create the new one, and delete the old. This happens exactly once for every user on their first visit since Oct. 22 to any Kinja site. The graph below shows the…
Recently we had a few days for doing freestyle development and research at work. As a big-data enthusiast I instantly chose a task that was about investigating an arbitrary graph database solution and trying to model some subset of our data with it.