I have worked recently in Netflix on a project which was hitting one of our Cassandra clusters. (By the way, we use Cassandra here a lot, wherever possible we prefer it to RDBMS, so we got tons of instances running Cassandra.) Part of what my code had to do was to retrieve a set of […]
I remember a while back I was headhunted by a (tech) company and the initial discussions went rather well so I decided to accept their invitation to go to their office for a more in-depth interview discussion. While meeting one of their team members the discussion came up about how do I keep myself up […]
Ok, so if you haven’t been watching my activity on GitHub you might have missed this, and as such I feel it deserves a full on blog post. Recently, having joined Netflix, I started using some of their libraries, as to be expected. One of the things that I used pretty much from day one […]
I have started using recently Gradle, which I have to confess I actually find to be a bliss compared to Maven. Maybe because I prefer a Groovy-based syntax for build configuration, rather than Maven’s XML-based configuration file. Or maybe because I feel somehow the Gradle peeps have made the tool a bit easier to use […]
Every now and then I feel any developer should sit down and reflect upon some of the experiences from the past. I feel this is healthy: once you allow enough time to pass, you can go back and revisit good and bad (technical and less technical) experiences from the past and learn from them. The […]
I wrote before about how bad occasionally mobile advertising gets nowadays (see this blog post here). That was about 6 months ago — and I was hoping things started to change in the meanwhile. (After all, in the Valley we hear a lot about how quickly the world changes, right? :D) Well, it appears not […]
It’s been known for a while now that I have taken on the role of CTO of The Linus Group. It has been said at the time about this that I am changing my area of expertise, since I left Magnetic / Cognitive Match who were clearly focused on online advertising to join a company […]
As you might know by now, I’ve adjusted a bit my career recently. My core experience is a techie in the online advertising world — and as of recently I’ve moved into an adjacent segment: digital marketing. It sounds like a drastic move, but to be honest, when you look closely, it’s actually the same […]
I’m a techie by trade, I’m sure you figured that out from the sort of things I blog about here. As such, I do get rubbed up the wrong way when I hear of so many companies complaining on a regular basis about their technical team. It’s either because they don’t deliver on time. Or […]
I read recently Robert Lindh’s post on his blog about the argument he makes for re-branding the concept of “open source” and I have to sympathize with it. If you’re a techie you are quite likely accustomed to the concept of open source and probably use some open source framework or stack. In fact you […]
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