- Front End Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
- Ops Engineer
Since 2011, General Assembly has transformed tens of thousands of careers through pioneering, experiential education in today's most in-demand skills. As featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times, GA offers training in web development, data, design, business, and more, both online and at campuses around the world. Our global professional community boasts 40,000 full- and part-time alumni — and counting.
Our engineering team is around 25 people that are fairly evenly split between New York and remote. We have engineers from London to SF who work asynchronously via GitHub and Slack. We place a strong focus on allowing every engineer to have a voice and an impact. We are also anti-dogmatic: use whatever code editor you like, pair-program when you like, and favor trying new things over a fear of mistakes.
We're primarily a Ruby on Rails & React shop, with some custom nginx proxies, AWS Lambda, and Go mixed in. We're looking for people that will help us shape our architecture and guide our team towards best practices. We want engineers who will not just write code but help us produce great products and experiences for our students and partners.
Former Google SRE here. Trust me, many of the problems we faced were solved on whiteboards, during chats at lunch, or via email. Most of issues we faced were of a class that simply isn't covered on basic sites like Stack Overflow.
The interview described is pretty much exactly as I remember them. SRE is actually quite difficult to get into, precisely because you need to have fairly deep knowledge on a wide range of topics. The "ways in which you were asked to solve problems" are actually the best way to determine if an application actually knows about what they will need to know.
An extremely common use case is to have several google accounts, typically when using various Google Apps domains.
Instead of understanding that I'm the same person with access to all of the accounts, it makes me log into each one separately. For most products you can be logged into each one simultaneously, but the first one you log into is the "default". Analytics, for example, doesn't even support multi-login, so if that "default" account is not the one you want, you have to log out of ALL of them. WAT
For us, it just worked. I'm a one-man engineering team at a startup, so I don't have the resources to devote to running an in-house CI setup. Circle took care of it for us, and their UI and features are just perfect.
Congrats to Paul and the rest of the team! I have been recommending CircleCI to all of my dev friends ever since my first experience with it over a year ago.
We had a pretty tricky front end testing setup with our Rails app, due primarily to some bleeding edge javascript interactions that needed to be tested in a headless browser. It took ages to get right locally, so I had zero confidence that Circle would handle it. I set up our repo and promptly forgot about, as I was traveling out to SF for Startup School 2012.
While waiting in the lobby of YC for the pre-event dinner, I got an email from Circle (actually, from Paul) that our repo was ready and all tests were passing. PASSING?! Whoa. As I read it, I looked up from my phone and Paul was standing in front of me. I wanted to give him a hug, but I settled for a friendly thank you and a handshake. =)
Agreed 100%. I was just touching the surface, and by "shipping" I really meant inventory management, purchase orders, and everything else involved in stocking physical goods.
It's clear the POS app is a test product for them, and I'm happy to see them experiment. I just wish they'd put a little more love into the core functionality. Even for ecommerce, Shopify is lacking some really basic things:
- Editing orders (e.g. marking an item canceled)
- Editing tracking numbers (fixing typos -- not allowed today)
- Allowing coupons to offer both a discounted price and free shipping (today they're mutually exclusive)
Great news. Shopify is the one piece of ecommerce software we use that isn't completely maddening. (Having a fantastic API is a large reason why.)
I was struck by this comment, though:
"Using Shopify and Shopify POS together reveals our true
ambition: To be the first company in the world that fuses
all the distinct parts that are needed to run a complete
modern commerce business - all in one amazing product."
If anyone thinks they can run a complete business using only Shopify, they're sorely mistaken. It's only a shopping cart. If you want to actually ship items, you need to use one of their third-party apps or roll your own. Those apps are the reason that ecommerce with Shopify is still frustratingly difficult -- unnecessarily so.
I just switched to Time Warner Cable and they offered me basically the same plan, with 50/5 bandwidth. I forgot the price, as I don't care to pay anything extra for TV.
My goal wasn't to give specific advice to people in certain situations. My examples are hypothetical; maybe I didn't make that clear.
Instead, the point of the article was to motivate you to go actually make sales, create value, and build relationships. None of these things require a developer. Do I know who you should specifically call to test the market in a given context? No; that's your problem to figure out. The point is that you CAN figure it out.
As mentioned in another comment, I managed a Google SRE team that help run Borg for 5 years. I'm good friends with several of the folks who are rebuilding it using Mesos at Twitter. They are all insanely awesome people.
Let's say you have a Rails stack (app server + DB) that you want to deploy for testing in 3 different datacenters. If that works out, you then immediately need to deploy 10,000 instances each to 10 different datacenters. Oh yeah, and the storage needs to be distributed and universally available, in case any of the servers crash. Performance testing reveals that you can't have more than 10 servers per rack, otherwise you saturate the rack switch. You also need to account for power distribution redundancy, shifting traffic loads, etc.
Oh, and you want to do this with a single configuration that's manageable by a team of 3-4 people and have deployment be entirely automated and monitored.
The complexities behind this problem are simply enormous, almost too much to even comprehend. I am proud of the work we did at Google to attempt (yes, attempt) to solve this problem, and I know my friends at Twitter are doing great work as well. I'm mostly just happy that I can finally talk about it and that the badasses that do this work can get some credit.
I managed a Google SRE team that helped run Borg for 5 years, so I'm pretty familiar with this. You can certainly run multiple application servers on one machine using virtualization. What isn't easy is automating where the applications are deployed, in an elastic, constantly shifting way that deals with massive numbers of machines and constantly changing hardware.
Cheap hardware crashes. It crashes all the time. Furthermore, the application's needs themselves change all the time, depending on traffic curves and processing needs. The dynamic needs of Google's (and presumably Twitter's) completely heterogeneous application stacks don't lend themselves to simple virtualization and over-the-counter software. This is an incredibly tricky bin packing problem that was never quite solved in my 5 years at Google.
I don't know a lot about the "distributed frameworks" you mentioned, so perhaps they do this too. I kind of doubt it. If it were as easy as you think, I'm sure my friends at Twitter would be using what you mentioned.
It isn't always the software. Having open, controlled, customizable hardware can offer a huge advantage over what you're able to purchase from Cisco/Juniper/etc.
Also, a software switch allows you potentially massively scale the number of ports on a single switch.
Quick correction: only Redfin has MLS access (as they are a broker). As far as I know, Zillow and Trulia have very limited MLS access, and largely get their listings from the brokerages themselves.
Looking for:
Since 2011, General Assembly has transformed tens of thousands of careers through pioneering, experiential education in today's most in-demand skills. As featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times, GA offers training in web development, data, design, business, and more, both online and at campuses around the world. Our global professional community boasts 40,000 full- and part-time alumni — and counting.
Our engineering team is around 25 people that are fairly evenly split between New York and remote. We have engineers from London to SF who work asynchronously via GitHub and Slack. We place a strong focus on allowing every engineer to have a voice and an impact. We are also anti-dogmatic: use whatever code editor you like, pair-program when you like, and favor trying new things over a fear of mistakes.
We're primarily a Ruby on Rails & React shop, with some custom nginx proxies, AWS Lambda, and Go mixed in. We're looking for people that will help us shape our architecture and guide our team towards best practices. We want engineers who will not just write code but help us produce great products and experiences for our students and partners.
Learn more or apply: https://generalassemb.ly/careers