Posts

How we increased our click-through rates using bandits in Python and Redis

January 1, 2016 · code

Back in the days of print & TV advertising, it was practically impossible to accurately measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. Today with digital ads we can accurately track how many people saw an ad, for how long, whether they clicked on it and if they ended up purchasing the advertised product. Given that advertisers can close the loop, it makes sense for advertising technology to try and systematically make better choices about what ads it displays to whom in as real-time as possible.…

Rethinking online advertising by respecting the user: The load time chapter

October 30, 2015 · code

This is the first installment in a series of posts detailing the steps we are taking to make Imprint a pleasant and non-intrusive online advertising experience

JayBird BlueBuds X pseudo-review

October 1, 2015 · stuff

I am not really a product reviewer, the things that matter to me are rarely the things I see mentioned in professional product reviews. With that being said, I wanted to share some thoughts on a…

Vanilla and Blueberry Crème Brûlée

August 26, 2015 · food

Credit goes to ChefSteps for this one. Follow the recipe on chefsteps.com with two minor modifications:

Engineering Talent Wars

August 22, 2015 · stuff

Engineering talent is hard to come by in SF, we work with what we have

Watch your JSON

August 18, 2015 · code

I spent some time this weekend improving the performance of the server-side request processing logic for Imprint. This particular code path executes on every request for an Imprint impression, which on a casual day is around 10k requests / sec. The logic is fairly straight forward but several steps are required before we can send a single byte back to the client. A non-exhaustive list of computations required:…