The biggest professional challenge of my career: communication. Handling Growth with Postgres: 5 Tips From Instagram - Instagram Engineering. As we’ve scaled Instagram to an ever-growing number of active users, Postgres has continued to be our solid foundation and the canonical data storage for most of the data created by our users. While less than a year ago, we blogged about how we “stored a lot of data” at Instagram at 90 likes per second, we’re now pushing over 10,000 likes per second at peak–and our fundamental storage technology hasn’t changed. Over the last two and a half years, we’ve picked up a few tips and tools about scaling Postgres that we wanted to share–things we wish we knew when we first launched Instagram. Some of these are Postgres-specific while others are present in other databases as well. For background on how we’ve horizontally partitioned Postgres, check out our Sharding and IDs at Instagram post. 1. If you find yourself frequently filtering your queries by a particular characteristic, and that characteristic is present in a minority of your rows, partial indexes may be a big win. 2. 4. 5.
Go talk to founders who failed at what you're doing. It bothers me when someone tells me about their startup and I ask how it relates to xyz company that did something similar in the past, and they have no idea xyz even existed. It's a negative signal common to first-timers. I realize there is tremendous value in having a fresh perspective. But in startups there are so many paths to failure. If you are going to be a successful heat seeking missile, it really helps to know what has happened in your space and related spaces. At worst, it will help you avoid mistakes and stay on the right side of crazy.
At best, you will uncover secrets that can help you get traction faster. The best way to map your space is to go talk to the founders of xyz company. It's an outlet for them for pent up information and in some cases latent emotions. Thank you David Horowitz for reminding me last night of this great tactic. Jared Spool – Build a Winning UX Strategy from the Kano Model. Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:21 — 15.3MB) [ Transcript Available ] The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.
In his virtual seminar, Jared presents the Kano Model. The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar. Is consistency in design a bad thing? Recorded: November, 2012 [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] Full Transcript. Adam Churchill: Welcome, everyone, to another edition of the SpoolCast. Jared Spool: Well, thank you. Adam: For those that weren’t with us that day, can you give us an overview of the seminar?
Jared: Yeah. Adam: Very good. Jared: Yeah. Adam: In the File menu? Jared: In the File menu. Adam: “Print.” Yes, learn basic programming. A few people have asked me whether I think programming is a necessary skill for entrepreneurs (or anyone) to have in the future. When I was 14 years old, taking guitar lessons from Tom Pecora, he gave me that this-is-important-so-listen-well look, and told me something that stuck with me for life: “You need to learn to sing. Because if you don’t, you’re always going to be at the mercy of some asshole singer.” His point of view was from a rock guitarist in the Chicago music scene, trying to put together a band, and all that. But ever since then I’ve applied that point to other areas.
When I first started CD Baby, I didn’t know any programming, only basic HTML, and quickly had to cry for someone to help me. Later, when I needed a new computer, my friend Tony Benjamin taught me how to build my own from parts. In the independent musician scene, the DIY ethic is strong, by necessity. So... back to programming: If you heard someone say, “I have this idea for a song. And so comes my advice: If, Why, and How Founders Should Hire a “Professional” CEO | Reid Hoffman. 20 years ago, the classic startup model was to have young founders start a breakthrough company, then bring in “grey hair” in the form of experienced executives once it was time to scale the business. Key examples included Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, Google, and many smaller companies. In the last decade, however, that common wisdom has shifted, at least for consumer internet companies. The new received wisdom is that the best entrepreneurs can stay CEO through the entire growth cycle of the company.
Think of Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, or the late Steve Jobs. My partners at Greylock and I have invested in a number of young founding CEOs who match this pattern and are doing a fantastic job leading their companies through hypergrowth, such as Brian Chesky of AirBnB and Drew Houston of Dropbox. Last year, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz articulated a well-thought-out philosophy on why he prefers to back Founder-CEOs and keep them in charge as the company grows. How do we make the transition? About. Set good defaults | Justin Kan. Setting up good default behavior is very important. In fact, most people never change the default settings for the things they use. For software designers, this means investing time thinking about what you want to happen if nothing changes. For example, this is why Google pays to be the default search in mobile OSes and browsers, and why Google invested so heavily in a mobile OS (Android) where they would automatically be the default search: most users will never change their browser to default to another search engine.
At Exec, we spend time thinking about default behavior. This is what it looks like the first time: This is what it looks like after you’ve used us once: The difference is pretty obvious: the second time you use the service, we default to the home you’ve already cleaned. At a meta level, I’ve spent some time thinking about what things make good defaults for a company. What other possible default behaviors can you change in your work environment? Kudos.