Recent content on Dan Goldin
I had a bit of a blogging break this year but the pull of tradition is too strong. For the sixth year in a row I updated my Yahoo fantasy football stats scraper to pull Yahoo’s projected fantasy stats for the upcoming season. The only change this year was the addition of a “O Rank” column which was simple to implement so I have no excuse for pushing this off till the last minute.…
Last year I looked at the markup of a few different food delivery services by comparing their prices against the ones on the restaurant’s menu. I got the chance to do the same thing for Instacart a few days ago when the receipt was included alongside the delivery. The markup wasn’t as significant or variable as the food delivery apps and was just over 9% for the majority of items. I…
While there are a lot of strong opinions about Slack on both sides, it clearly changed the way work gets done. I’m mixed. I appreciate the ability to quickly drop a question or response asynchronous yet acknowledge how disruptive it is and prevents deep work. The one thing that I did notice in our usage of Slack is that quite often the same message ends up being posted across multiple…
My mind started wandering while half-listening to a Clubhouse discussion and I had the thought that Clubhouse - and generally any real time communication app - can end up being a solution to Deepfakes. At some point Deepfakes will be good enough to render in real time but until then having synchronous communication is a way to confirm the authenticity of the participants. On top of that I’m…
One of my favorite podcasts is NPR’s How I Built This that conducts interviews with entrepreneurs across a variety of industries, not just tech. A recent episode was an interview with Judi Sheppard Misset , the creator of Jazzercise - a dance fitness class that she launched in 1969. We all realize that there’s much less friction to launch a business these days but the interview makes…
There’s an old story of Steve Jobs meeting Drew Houston in order to acquire Dropbox but after being refused calling Dropbox a feature. Dropbox kept innovating, building a great product, went public and is currently a $9 billion company. Clearly Dropbox proved Steve Jobs wrong. But did it really? Dropbox recently announced a round of layoffs and their stock has dropped 20% since they went…
This the first post written on my new blogging setup so what better topic than the new blog setup? Years ago I redesigned my entire site to use AMP across all devices, powered by Jekyll, and hosted on GitHub pages. At the end of 2020 I decided I was ready to abandon AMP and move toward a more traditional and straightforward setup while leveraging a more modern toolchain. Due to my adoption of AMP…
It’s the holiday season and mine has been filled with a lot of Bing Crosby . I’m one of those people that will Wikipedia anything new and came across this sentence that describes his popularity: “Also in 1948, Music Digest estimated that his recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music” This reminded me of another celebrity…
In what seems to be a part of the modern American experience there’s another case of a scientific group proposing some changes and a regulatory agency ignoring the suggestions. In this case, a group of scientists proposed further limiting sugar and alcohol but the USDA didn’t include these in their official guidance. There may be some truth to the USDA’s claim that there…
Despite 2020 showing us how unpredictable the world can be, it’s that wonderful time of the year when everyone comes up with goals for the upcoming year. On one hand it’s impossible to predict what will happen but on the other hand it is useful to give some sense of purpose and direction. Being thoughtful and public around our goals is also a way to encourage us to commit and see them…
As part of my project to come up with a utility to deduplicate images on S3 I started working on a proof of concept to validate the flow and functionality. I know that the AWS S3 API has everything I need but I wanted to see whether I could use the built in OS tools to handle the image comparison without resorting to a webapp. The steps I had in mind were pretty simple:
While looking through my blog’s analytics I noticed that I have a few posts that have views despite being written years ago. Some of these are still relevant while others are woefully out of date. For example, the difference between yyyy and YYYY in Java’s SimpleDateFormat is still relevant but how to scrape web pages has changed significantly since 2013 and anything that has pricing…
A few years ago I redid this entire blog to use AMP - not just for mobile but also for desktop. The motivation was to improve the performance while scratching my curiosity itch. It was a fun experiment but these days I’m more averse to Google’s dominance and think I can do even better by taking what I liked from AMP but going even simpler. It took quite a bit of work to get everything…
I have a script I use to analyze and visualize my blogging. One script generates a simple CSV file containing a variety of metadata about my blogging that I then feed into a Grafana dashboard to see how I’m doing. Another script does some simple visualizations. In the past years I had an annual tradition of sharing these visualizations and describing each one but I took a look at this…
A few weeks ago I evangelized degrading functionality in the case of system outages as an option versus building out full regional resiliency. Someone asked me to dig into my example more so I’ll share a bit of how one of our core systems at TripleLift is set up. We run an advertising exchange handing tens of billions of ad requests each day. AdTech has a ton of different companies with each…
As a kid I used to be obsessed with all things space. A big part was having the same name as the head of NASA, Daniel Goldin, where I harbored illusions that they wouldn’t even have to change the nameplate on the door. My parents supported this interest and got me subscriptions to a variety of space and science magazines. I did not go the space route but despite that I’m sure that…
Last year I wrote a short post highlighting my donations with the hope that they encourage others to donate. Given this year’s trials and tribulations it’s even more important to donate and help others if you have the means. I continued my donations from last year and donated to the EFF, ACLU, Wikipedia, and Planned Parenthood for the same reasons as last year. The additions this year…
Despite not being in the code too much these days I still spend a significant amount of time on the computer so thought it would be fun to share my commonly used tools. Maybe there’s something here you’re not familiar with and it might be enough to encourage you to give it a shot. Hardware For the first half of the year I used Ubuntu on a ThinkPad X1 but switched back to a Macbook…
The above is Tesla’s stock price since its IPO in 2010. On its first day it closed at $3.84 and was relatively flat until earlier this year at which point it shot up closing at $661.77 on December 24. If you invested $1,000 at the IPO that would be worth over $172,000. I’m one of those unlucky fools that purchased Tesla early - in 2011 - but then sold it in 2015. My $1,148.20…
In honor of everyone on-call during the holidays I thought I’d share my evolving thoughts around incident response. Every company has something here and as much as we can strive for perfection it’s impossible and we’ll inevitably have incidents that need handling. I’m still thinking through the exact way to approach and summarize my thoughts but I find it useful to start…
As we get into the last week of the year many software teams are in a code freeze - avoiding any deployments that may cause an incident and cause a dreaded holiday page. We have a tendency to reward the firefighter for pulling an all-nighter fighting an outage but don’t value those that avoid the fire in the first place. It’s natural to throw accolades at the firefighter since…
Inbox Zero is a productivity philosophy that’s centered around getting to an empty email inbox. That means you treat your inbox as a todo list and once you’ve handled every email you’re good to go. I’m somewhat successful dealing with my inbox but my browser tabs are another story. Browser Zero is a corollary to Inbox Zero. What good is getting to an empty inbox if you…
At the beginning of the year I gave myself 4 goals for 2020 and now that the year is wrapping up it’s time to see how I did: not well. The year was a tough one for most people but all things considered I’m in a privileged position and can’t blame COVID too much. For sure there were periods of ennui but the root was that I just lost interest and motivation in some of these. So how…
My latest rant is against support plans for enterprise software. It’s frustrating to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a contract and yet be forced to pay an additional fee for support. Even worse, this additional fee is usually a function of your existing spend. I understand the rationale - there needs to be a cost to support otherwise everyone has an incentive to escalate and…
Stanford Medicine is in the news for using an “algorithm” and allocating minimal COVID vaccines to those actually on the frontlines. Instead it supposedly prioritized senior administrators who are working from home. I’m sure there’s some truth to the algorithm biasing allocation to those who are older but whenever I see someone blame an algorithm my spidey-sense goes off.…
I’m a digital hoarder and whenever I had to switch computers, I was always worried about losing files. These days it’s both lower risk since so much is scattered across the cloud but with the ascent of AWS I’ve resorted to just backing up my computers onto S3. I simply do a recursive copy of my home folder to S3 and call it a day. One problem this exposes is that there are…
Despite writing web applications many engineers are not familiar with the infrastructure side of the internet - DNS , BGP , TCP/IP - and yet depend on it all working. Over the years I’ve gotten a better understanding of the guts of the internet but only in the past few weeks have I discovered Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) on top of BGP. RPKI is meant to add a layer of trust on…
When I first heard of Substack I wasn’t too impressed. I fell into the usual engineering trick of thinking it’s something that could be “built in a weekend” but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Last week I listened to an interview with Substack’s CEO , Chris Best, which made me realize the scale and scope of Substack’s ambitions. At the most…
If you’ve been following this blog you likely know that I subscribe to the Inbox Zero approach to email management. I treat my inbox as a todo list and strive to get it down to zero with varying success. In any case, I spend a lot of time in my email and I noticed an odd pattern to how I deal with handled messages. Some I will delete while I others I’ll archive but it happens…
Two days ago I wrote up a quick post highlighting how Amazon owns more than $2B domains and it struck a nerve. It’s been shared quite a bit on Twitter and I posted it to Hacker News on Friday night before going to bed to wake up to it being near the top which drove a ton of views. It’s always a surprise seeing what takes off but there’s something about Amazon owning billions of…
Open source changed the way we write code. It’s given many of us a starting set of tools that allowed us to quickly put together new products and allowed us to specialize. These days open source is as strong as ever but there are a lot of changes happening on the licensing side. Under the older open source licenses, any company could take your code and then launch it as their own service.…
While listening to a podcast discussing BGP I heard the fact that AWS owns more than $2B worth of IP addresses. I knew AWS was massive but this came as a big shock so I decided to do some digging around. I came across a site that listed the market prices of IP addresses and the range looks to be anywhere from $20 to $30 per IP depending on the block size. Now it was time to figure out the IP…
As a kid I was incredibly addicted to video games. I had a whole cat-and-mouse routine going on with my parents. They would put a BIOS boot password on the computer and I would open up the case, remove the battery, and reset the BIOS settings. They would lock the basement, where our one and only computer was located, and I would climb in through the window. They would lock the door to the computer…
AWS had a large multi-hour Kinesis outage last Wednesday that affected a variety of dependent services, including Cloudwatch, Lambda, ECS, and EKS. These systems are complicated and highlight the scale and complexity of modern cloud computing. It’s impossible to be perfect but it’s a reminder for all of us to think through our applications and identify their failure cases. Just because…
While listening to the Software Engineering Daily podcast I came across an interview with Jai Pradeesh and Sanket Saurav who are the founders of DeepSource , a modern code analysis tool. I’m a sucker for these types of tools and willing to try anything that’s low friction and promises to me more productive so I gave it a shot on two of my open source repos - health-stats and…
I have a small script that takes an export of Apple Health data and then dumps it into a MySQL database that I then use to visualize my health metrics over time. My prior workflow was to open the app and then Airdrop the file over to my computer at which point I’d unzip it, copy the relevant file over into the script directory, and simply run the script.
I was born in the Soviet Union, came over as a 5 year old, and have seen my Russian getting worse and worse due to a lack of exposure. I’ve been using quarantine as a way to practice and improve my Russian through daily lessons in the Duolingo app. It’s a well designed app and while it has some flaws I’m on a 191 day streak and am loath to give it up. One thing that’s…
I had a fun little experience over the past few days. Someone had ordered Domino’s in the UK and seemingly typed in my email address by accident. This gave me the privilege of receiving daily emails from Domino’s promoting their latest deal. The first few days it was novel and interesting seeing what was popular across the pond but this morning I decided I might as well unsubscribe. Lo…
I empathize with Medium’s need to make money while avoiding ads but as an author it’s a bad deal. Medium has great editing and writing tools and a built in audience but if your goal is to share your articles with as broad of an audience as possible the fact that Medium throws up a paywall is a non-starter. Sure you can avoid it by going incognito but how many readers know that?
Earlier this week Apple announced the new MacBook Air, featuring the Apple-built M1 chip, and heralding the return to their own chips. I wrote the first post on this blog in 2008 covering Apple acquiring PA Semi and claimed that it made sense to design their own chips for phones but not PCs. Well it’s been 12 years and Apple has figured out how to make incredible chips for their phones so…
If you were to summarize my personal tech stack it would be Google software and Apple hardware. There are a few exceptions but those two companies likely cover the bulk of my technology usage. They’re great at what they do within their domains yet the intersection is lacking, especially on the Apple Watch. I suspect Apple is to blame for some of this but it doesn’t seem as if Google…
I’m a believer in climate change and know we need to change our habits and yet every time I drive I’m reminded of how amazing gasoline is. A gallon of a liquid is not much - we can all drink a gallon of water a day and yet a gallon of gasoline is enough to move a mutli-ton car more than 20 miles. It’s so normal that we don’t appreciate how amazing that actually is.
It’s starting to feel as if everyone I follow on Twitter is launching a Substack newsletter. I don’t know how this plays out but my inbox is already overwhelmed and having more longish-form content to go through just won’t happen. It’s an interesting space that’s changing quickly and will look very different in a few years. Many seem to think that there’s a huge…
Some people are able to control urges but I’m much better off just removing the objects of desire entirely. In high school this manifested in me spending way too much time on video games. These days it’s buying a bag of potato chips and then being unable to stop once I crack it up. I tried giving TikTok a go to see what all the fuss was about but had to drop it cold turkey after…
I’m not sure where I discovered this tip but I’ll often want to know the members of a Google group. The ways to get this are constantly changing - from double clicking the group within the Gmail compose window for a summary modal to going deep into the Groups UI. Somewhere in between is the group view provided by Google Calendar. I’m often in there and it turns out to be a pretty…
Last week I installed the iOS 14 beta since I’m curious about what’s coming - even if it ends up bricking my phone. I expected it to come with more privacy features but one that surprised me was an alert that apps wanted to “find and connect to devices on your local network.” This is an obvious one Apple covered this functionality during WWDC . It’s interesting seeing…
During a engineering management peer group discussion this morning we were talking about how involved each of us are in our team’s activities - for example how often do we look at code? Do we leave comments on pull requests? How involved are we in spec reviews? And a variety of questions of that ilk. At that point in time I wasn’t clever enough to come up with a framework but…
After almost 2 years of Ubuntu I’ve moved to a Mac. There were a variety of reasons for switching back but the ultimate reason was simply that I had stability issues on Ubuntu and it was rare for it to go a week without freezing up. The overall lack of polish in Ubuntu didn’t help but I could have dealt with it had it not be for the frequent freezes and crashes.
A trap software engineers usually fall into is underestimating how long some things will take and I’m no different. Yet lately I’ve somehow been on the other end. Nearly every task I’ve had to do the past few weeks - either technical, managerial, or personal - has ended up taking a shorter amount of time than I expected. The blocker has been getting into the mindset and finding…
Apple hit a $2T market cap and yet I can’t help but think they’re in an incredibly precarious situation due to the relationship between the US and China. I find the Apple/US/China dynamic much more interesting than what’s going on with TikTok. Right now it feels as if every side wants Apple to succeed. For the US it’s a success story and a cultural export to the world. To…