Until recently, I was extremely skeptical of cryptocurrency in general. In the midst of the investment speculation and mania in late 2013,...
Bitcoin Paved the Way, but it’s Not the Future of Cryptocurrency
The Taxonomy of Terrible Programmers
The MarkedUp Analytics team had some fun over the past couple of weeks sharing horror stories about software atrocities and the real-life inspirations for the things you read on The Daily WTF. In particular, we talked about bad apples who joined our development teams over the years and...
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Win32 Errors: How to Format GetLastError() Output into Readable Strings
I’ve been doing a moderate amount of native Win32 C++ programming over the past few weeks, and occasionally I’ve needed to set up some debug points to print errors that occur during file and memory I/O.
When something goes wrong inside the Win32 API, some methods will return a...
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You Succeed Once You Stop Giving a Shit
This post is about how to find success in any situation and draws entirely from my own experiences. Your mileage may vary.
July was a rough month for me this year – I endured simultaneous failure on all fronts. I had put on a shitload of weight, ended...
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Being Right is Always the Wrong Choice
It was about four or five years ago that I had an intrinsic need to be “right” all the time.
I couldn’t let it go when someone made a mistake, or slighted me, or disputed the quality / direction of my work. Everyone else was wrong. I wasn’t alone in...
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Instant File Server: turn any directory into a webserver with a simple command
Our engineering team has been neck-deep in configuration hell lately. Editing 2000-line Solr configuration files, trying to get Apache Oozie integrated into DataStax Enterprise, Cassandra 1.2 upgrades, and more – and the one thing in common with all of these tasks is the prevalence of enormous XML configuration files.
Having...
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Cassandra Summit Talk: Real Time Analytics with Cassandra, Hive, and Solr
I spoke at the Cassandra Summit this year about how we use Cassandra, Hive, and Solr in production at MarkedUp Analytics.
Planet Cassandra recently made all of the videos and slides available and I thought I would share. Enjoy!
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Brush the Dust Away
This post is about stress.
It's been nearly a year since I started MarkedUp Analytics, and we've come a long way - I've raised money, won the business of some amazing customers, built the nucleus of a really talented team, and developed a product that people rave about. At the previous //BUILD conference, no one had ever heard of us - this time our logo was shown onstage during a keynote. Feels like progress; none of it was easy.
I took my first vacation in two years last week and had a chance to put some distance between myself and MarkedUp for the first time since inception, and I thought a lot about some of the assumptions I had about starting a company when I was just getting started, in particular this section from "The Seven Unproductive Habits of Startup Founders:"
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What Do You Need to Become an Elite Developer?
MarkedUp Analytics’s customers are developers and so are most of the people who work at the company, so I spend a lot of time thinking about and refining my answers to the following two questions:
- What are the lowest common denominator skills and programming knowledge that my...
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How to Learn a New Programming Skill
I was really surprised with the positive reception 10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer received after it got picked up on Hacker News and a few other places. One theme that became immediately clear to me in some of the feedback in...