How well do you know your users? Recently, I decided we didn’t know ours well enough. I set off to find out more about the people behind our product, and in the process, attempted to answer some (very basic) business questions. The classic tool for browsing the user base is the CRM. But its strict schema made data exploration a chore. I needed simplicity, flexibility, and automation: adjectives…
Sleepless nights at a train station and state-sponsored discrimination. This is the story of how my father came to finally attend college as a teenager in the Soviet Union. In 1970 my father was 17 years old, living with his parents and brother in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He was interested in radio electronics, having built radios and clocks as a teenager. His father (my grandfather) was an…
Five days ago, Ian and I released a simple and clean markdown editor called Socrates.io . It was just a weekend project, so we didn’t expect much. But the responses have been incredible: In just 5 days, 17,000+ people have created over 7,000 documents. They’ve performed over 100,000 saves. We saw a peak of 425 concurrent users, and 100+ are online right now. We’ve heard from a person writing a…
More and more systems are advertising high availability but leaving the responsibility for failover in the hands of third-party clients or the end user. That forces the average user to implement their own (janky) failover scheme to keep their app from failing. Systems that advertise availability should be responsible for failover up to and including the client. Failover preparedness is a…
I love the terminal, and I bet you do too. Don’t take this advice often, but go ahead and run this command: curl -s http://animals.ivolo.me/?index = 8 Bear with me here. How about a random animal that moves? curl -s https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/examples/loading.sh | sh ( ` . ) ) ( ( \ \ .- ' `-. / `. ( ) `-._ , _ ) ,' ( . \- - '( \ ( ) / \ \ \_( / ( <6 (6 \_)))\ ( ._ .:Y)__ ''' \ `…
In Batching REST APIs - Part 1 , I talked about why offering batching APIs and batching REST clients is important for high traffic web services. Today I wanted to talk about some of the thoughts and design decisions that went into building our first REST clients. Before I started, I wanted to nail down the tao of our official Segment.io REST clients. Here are the requirements I came up with. I…
At Segment.io , we’re currently working on building our REST clients for the popular languages, so that our users can consume our ingestion and query APIs serverside. Our import API also doubles as a batching endpoint, so you can send us more than one event per HTTP request. Batching is incredibly important in server-side environments. This is because high-performance applications, like web…