A Developer's Journey

Any company that makes data-driven decisions needs to have easy access to comprehensive views of their application's data. Average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), cart abandonment rates, etc. are all crucial to understanding where to focus development efforts to maximize the...

Similar to most web applications that don't have millions of users, our simple server architecture sufficed for the first couple years of our company. Two front-end servers (EC2 instances), one load balancer, and one database server (RDS instance). Apart from the occasional press hit where we...

I was the 3rd engineer when I started at thredUP. Scrum consisted of two co-founders and two engineers. We all did full-stack development, design work, CS tickets, bugs, QA, and maintained the servers. We weren't qualified to do most of that, but our resources were so limited that we were...

To build something great, you need to have the drive to do it right and the opportunity available to make it happen. Most companies hire internally for a position like 'Lead Mobile' so your only hope is to join a team, put a couple years in to prove yourself, and eventually you might be promoted....

I know I've been absent from writing for months. I have a couple of posts in the works and I'll be getting back on my blogging horse shortly, but in the mean time I have something I'd like to share.

I came across a YouTube video (go figure) that had amazing quotes in it. I wanted to tweet them...

As soon as your website amasses a sizable amount of users - probably somewhere around 50,000 or so - you're going to require two different types of emailing services. One for mass email (emails sent to your entire user base) and one for transaction email (emails sent to individual users after an...

SEO has amassed a bad reputation over the years. Is it legit? Is it snake oil? The truth lies somewhere in the middle. SEO can improve the quantity and quality of organic traffic you receive, but it's not magic. The SEO 'specialists' who suggest building link farms, low-value landing pages, and...

We upgraded the thredUP app from Rails 3.0 to Rails 3.1 this past week. On the day we deployed the upgrade, our test suite was green and everything looked solid locally and on our staging server, but out of sheer paranoia I decided to take one of our front-end servers off of the load balancer and...

In the past year, the post 2.0 web design era has really come into its own. I wrote about the start of this when web designers first started to embrace HTML5 and what it has to offer, but the time has finally come when over-the-top Flash websites, such as this one, are no longer the standard for...

Employee equity has always been a nebulous topic for me. Every time I thought I understood how it worked, I would read or hear something that made me question my understanding. Thank goodness people like Fred Wilson exist. He is a venture capitalist, blogger, and a budding professor. The video I...

If you're a web developer and you have spent time writing JavaScript and/or styling with CSS, odds are you're familiar with Chrome Developer Tools (CDT). When I discovered CDT, my front-end productivity sky-rocketed. Editing CSS on the fly, inspecting HTML, and interacting/debugging with the...

Being inspired is one of the strongest types of motivation for me. When I see something great, I can become inspired to build something of equal caliber or at least put more effort into what I'm currently working on. Sometimes the execution of an idea can be just as inspiring as the idea itself....