It’s extremely interesting how solving a hard computational problem immediately translates into the scalability of a company so often! Take for instance the meal prep delivery model, where people order a week’s worth of food that’s then delivered locally. Strangely, there’s not many good options on how to solve the logistic challenge that arises Continue reading “Solving NP-hard biz problems with Declarative Programming!”
Best of APIs: Non-Blocking Functional Programming!
Recently I took it upon myself to refactor some existing APIs into 100% Non-Blocking, where the CPU never sits around waiting for I/O to finish. As it turns out, this was only as hard as converting our data access layers into async calls. Continue reading “Best of APIs: Non-Blocking Functional Programming!”
Signal Encryption: A New Expectation of Privacy
Over at Dust, we’ve just about finished up our switch to the Signal Encryption protocol, which is currently the most secure protocol for sending encrypted messages through an untrusted network asynchronously. There’s lots of whitepapers on it, so I’ll just stick to why it’s important for the public at large. Continue reading “Signal Encryption: A New Expectation of Privacy”
Enigma: Bitcoin-iffication of Sharing Economy?
Many of you out there are fans of Bitcoin, a decentralized monetary system that’s kind of unstoppable now since it’s hard to crush millions of nodes. Not sure how I feel about Bitcoin, but I’ve been reading up on Enigma, which essentially uses similar fancy math to create an almost perfect decentralized market, in theory. Continue reading “Enigma: Bitcoin-iffication of Sharing Economy?”
Node.js Bootstrapping: Production web app from A-Z
If you want to build a full stack web app with an HTML frontend, there are few ways faster and more flexible than Node.js. Be warned though, you’ll run into issues eventually if Continue reading “Node.js Bootstrapping: Production web app from A-Z”
Realtime Recommendation Engines!
Long ago, letsmakeit.com was a Flash P2P app with social media features. As such, I’ve always had an interest in the distributed machine learning techniques used by the biggest guys out there. Continue reading “Realtime Recommendation Engines!”
Centralized Reporting with ELK Stack
There are a lot of third party services out there that provide you with analytics on your app. This is just about always the best instant solution, but eventually you’re always limited by whatever features they do or don’t provide. A custom reporting system (or at least a collection of hacks) is always necessary after a certain point and usually gets pretty ugly. If you have a solid enough dev team, the best solution is to roll your own central reporting using the ELK (ElasticSearch/Logstash/Kibana) stack from the get-go! Continue reading “Centralized Reporting with ELK Stack”
Lets Make It: Planet scale UGC
LetsMakeIt was up until recently a beta Flash app that connected users to a shared whiteboard they could publish. Since Flash is dead, I figured I’d dig through some of the lessons learned in building such a beast. The first lesson is how to scale a service that allows near-unlimited User Generated Content (UGC). Continue reading “Lets Make It: Planet scale UGC”