It's tempting and easy (for the fortunate) to buy a Thing or and App to occupy their kids so they can have our own device time. STEM apps are educational; guilt-free, no harm. Right?
But device time is robbing our children of the trials and frustrations and educational opportunities provided by the dirty, analog, political, unfair, painful and tangible-risk REAL world.
When I was growing up there was a declared difference between those with an academic education and a "street" education. Now it seems the difference is between the virtual social landscape and reality.
Hiring all roles (mobile, front end, java services, infrastructure) in San Francisco and Seattle.
Yammer's mission has always been to connect people with information to enable better, faster decisions. We believe effective communication involves more than chat rooms (though we use those too!). A big part of the mission I enjoy is that we are sparking cultural changes in our customers; to become transparent workplaces, with fewer silos and greater connections across the org chart from left to right and bottom to top.
Since winning TechCrunch in 2008 our growth has been exponential year over year. Over the last 4 years as a part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, we've been quietly tying our systems together with the O365 fabric while continuing to improve the experience using our tried-and-true data-driven methods. We know everything we ship has an impact, and precisely how much.
We create with vim, SublimeText, IntelliJ, and GitHub; run on Macs and Ubuntu; write Swift & ObjC, Java (Dropwizard), Python, and Ruby on Rails; manage PostgreSQL, HBase, RabbitMQ, Memcache, HAProxy, ElasticSearch, Kafka, Storm, Kibana, and Vertica clusters at scale; and automate using Puppet, Docker, Mesos, Marathon and Azure across physical data center & cloud environments.
We have two floors in the "Twitter building" at 10th and Market in San Francisco, where we work next to the Outlook Mobile, MileIQ, Volumetrix, and other acquired startup teams. It's a fantastic, open, creative space.
If San Francisco isn't your thing, we have a large sibling team in Seattle (Redmond). We're hiring for all roles in both locations!
Microsoft pays very competitively, invests in employees, and is highly supportive of a diverse and respectful workplace. It's a startup atmosphere with the stability and maturity of a large company, which makes it a perfect balance for me.
If you have questions about a role I'd be happy to talk over email or in person. (I've been at Yammer for 7 years.)
I've personally had long-running EC2 instances with uptimes in years. You could do it cheaper in terms of hardware, but at the cost of wasting time at the colo while you could be building cool shit.
[i got permissions from Lachlan Donald at 99 Designs to post his email to me here - jm3]
We [at 99 Designs] actually don't have a huge number of instances, although we are steadily adding more and more.
We have at present:
2 x Caching Proxies (Large)
8 x App Servers (Large)
3 x DB Servers (High-CPU X-Large)
2 x Workers (Large)
We started out with a lot more small instances, but found that the disk performance on the small instances is extremely variable and often terrible.
We also use RightScale for management and are at present looking at using server arrays to scale up and down the App Server layer to deal with load spikes.
The biggest thing that reduced our need for lots of servers was moving as much functionality to asynchronous tasks as possible, which are queued on each appserver via Beanstalk queues and then consumed by the worker servers. Additionally we have as many pages http cache-able as we can, which are served directly from the squid cache at the front of the app.
Good start - I wasn't aware of the Litmus environment. The Animoto example is great, I love telling that story to people just starting to look into cloud computing.
To add to the large-environment roll call, here are the persistent server counts of some 100% cloud-hosted companies:
It wasn't long after Yammer moved up from LA that I joined, so IMHO it was a good move :) SOMA is just about the perfect place for startups: tons of converted office space, access to both City and peninsula engineers, it's easy to get to, and technology permeates almost everything you do.
The only real drawbacks are the cost of living and that we're in an echo chamber (SOMA) that's inside an echo chamber (Bay Area); it can be hard to remember that Uncle Joe doesn't check in on FourSquare, has never bought a coffee with Square and doesn't know who @aplusk is. Some startups really lose that perspective. I've worked at some of them. Yammer has perspective, a business plan, and Sacks and our CTO are the best leadership I've ever worked for. If we stay on our current trajectory, someday we'll graduate to needing a campus office park in Palo Alto. But for now, SOMA's a great place to work.
Chandler is the project featured in Scott Rosenberg’s book "Dreaming in Code" -- a thoroughly enjoyable book that explores why software development is so hard. The story ends a little too soon, after several years of experimentation, rewrites and failures. I wonder how they got from spinning wheels to v1.0? Anyone know?
If you're not happy at work, do whatever you have to do to change it -- even if you need to quit and build up a portfolio for a few months. I left a stable but miserable existence at IBM a couple years ago, and now enjoy every single day I'm working with my startup colleagues. Life's too short to be miserable.
We are looking for another top-notch front end dev here at Zivity. Feel free to email me at kevin@kev.in if you want to grab a beer at 21A some evening.
I've run http://Dibs.net on EC2 for over a year, with images served up on S3. Several servers have uptimes since I booted them in June '07. I have nothing but good things to say about my experience with AWS.
If you can, I highly recommend going to the AWS Start Up Tour (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/2008-aws-start.html) It's a good place to meet people and last year Jeff Bezos and John Doerr showed up to the one in Palo Alto.
Edit: Forgot to mention - I run PostgreSQL on instance storage with log shipping and backups to S3, and a couple of MySQL DBs for Cacti and geolocation lookups. EBS will help a lot in this area, which is kind of a pain right now. Can't wait to start using it.
Having spent a year trying to compete with Craigslist (albeit entirely on my own), I can say it's a damn hard market to break into. You're competing with free. Your market by definition scrimping on money. You're competing against a very well-known brand name.
I'd love it if my little hobby project (http://dibs.net) managed to take off, even a little bit. It'd be dead-simple to write apps against the API. I'd encourage it! IMHO, Dibs is what CL would be if it weren't built a decade ago.
I like your site. Perhaps we can both incorporate some ides together and come up with a master plan. Our site is www.AddAnything.com and we are doing lots of marketing to get it to a satisfiable level of success. Let me know your thoughts. thanks Mike
one problem right off the bat with dibs.net is that, as with seemingly 100% of US-based sites relying on geo-location information, it fails horribly outside of the (US-based) developer's market: I'm currently in Lucerne, central Switzerland, yet it put me in Emmen, a sleepy suburb north of Lucerne.
Edit: A quick re-test with the google map thingy shows me that dibs.net doesn't even want to know about Lucerne, and instead is fixated on suburbs and villages around Lucerne :(
My advice: Until there's some magical geolocation service that works 100% all of the time, don't offer it. I know I can change it on your site, but many many many people won't be doing that.
Thanks for the feedback slater. It's true that geolocation data is probably less accurate outside the US. And since I'm on a budget I use only free services (the paid data sources would have more accuracy). I might be missing your point, though. Emmen is only 4.4km from Lucerne, so the map search area is nearly identical. Is your issue that it says "Emmen" at the top?
You said it: Nearly identical. But in Europe, and more so in Switzerland where distances aren't so vast as in the US, 4.4km is "far away". Sounds silly, but it's true.
As for "my issue", it's the fact that I'm in more or less dead-central Lucerne, yet I can't for the life of me get the google maps widget to interact with your geolocation script to show "Lucerne". It gives me "Within 0 miles of" and then a list of suburbs and villages just outside of Lucerne: Emmen (4km away), Horw (about the same distance), Kriens (just outside of Lucerne), and Weggis, which is about 20km further down and on the other side of the lake! :D
But device time is robbing our children of the trials and frustrations and educational opportunities provided by the dirty, analog, political, unfair, painful and tangible-risk REAL world.
When I was growing up there was a declared difference between those with an academic education and a "street" education. Now it seems the difference is between the virtual social landscape and reality.