At Causes, we’ve been dealing with intermittent static asset failures. This manifests as certain images, stylesheets, and Javascripts failing to load and leads to a poor overall user experience. Our band-aid solution has been to fail over load balancers, which resolves the issue (until it crops up again). This is far from a perfect solution, and we still only ...
A few weeks ago, the Causes engineering team had an email thread with the subject “what’s in YOUR .gitconfig?” I’ve scraped together the most useful and most surprising (i.e. would not have thought to look for it when I first started playing with git). This .gitconfig is heavily commented, but ready to rock and roll ...
Building large email systems is a little different than other systems because the #1 priority is that you don’t accidentally send out emails. At the same time, you still need to profile and test it like you would any large scale system to look for flaws or bottlenecks. It’s very helpful to build in hooks ...
At Causes, we use a variety of programming languages – Ruby on Rails, Javascript+jQuery, Python, C, Bash – and beyond that, it’s not uncommon to hear conversations about Clojure, Scala, or Haskell. Different languages are good at different things — learning the motivations behind and best practices for those languages help broaden your knowledge and ...
Adam is a software engineer here at Causes and has the best personal bio on our team page. Fast deploys are important for keeping up overall momentum on a programming team. If an entire deploy takes 40 minutes, friction is high and deploys happen less frequently — meaning that “finished” code sits around longer waiting ...