HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dodger

162 karma · joined September 16, 2008

submissionscomments
dodger··on Fog Creek's Intern Hiring Process
Fog Creek dev, here - we, too, have had absolutely great hires from less-selective colleges and with not-so-great resumes. But if you're pressed for time and resources and you have to use a heuristic for where to put recruiting efforts, this can be a good one.
dodger··on How We Make Trello
This task used to be more distributed over the server-side devs, but having a single release manager who does this most of the time and other people who do it occasionally and/or when the release manager isn't working seems to work well.
dodger··on How We Make Trello
Yes, more or less a new branch for each fix. But with git and Kiln, it's really not a drag at all; the merges are generally really easy and mostly performed by our release manager when the card makes it to 'Ready to Merge'.
dodger··on Complaint-Driven Development
One time I was talking to a designer about doing it this way. The designer said "Yeah, that's a great way to find a (look of total disdain) _local_maximum_." As usual, some truth to both points of view.
dodger··on Why we love paying for Trello
Okay, we just pushed a change so that https://trello.com/business-class will behave nicely for everyone. For now, you can sign up without waiting for beta approval. =)
dodger··on Why we love paying for Trello
Thanks so much!
dodger··on Why we love paying for Trello
Hi! Trello Dev here! Could you change the Business Class link to point to https://trello.com/c/2A9OEGta for now? That would allow people to sign up for the beta, and the current link doesn't work unless you're already approved for the beta.

(I'm currently changing the business-class route to redirect you to that card if you don't have access.)

Thanks for the kind words about Trello, we're glad you like it!

dodger··on Trello celebrates One Million Users
. . . and here's an example of an issue with scaling it up: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13770826/poorly-balanced-...
dodger··on Trello celebrates One Million Users
Yes, I was trying to say that developing Trello is still really fun, even as it's getting bigger - we are starting to see some minor scaling challenges, but it's still a great time.

But we do use Trello to manage Trello, with a public dev board (https://trello.com/dev) and also internal boards to track things that are not yet public or that are too granular to expose externally.

Uservoice has a neat and somewhat complex setup: http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-pr...

And there are a bunch of good articles about how people are using Trello; searching for 'How I use Trello' turns up a lot of ideas. That being said, it's not going to fit everybody every time.

dodger··on Trello celebrates One Million Users
. . . and is still super, super fun to work on.
dodger··on WebSockets versus REST?
The Trello team loves WebSockets for push, and we did all of our initial prototyping and a lot of the first version doing RPC over the socket for writes and gets. However, now that we're supporting a REST API for other services to integrate with, we're moving everything other than pushing updates over to that so that we only have to support one API as we grow Trello's feature set. If we decide to go back to making requests over the socket, my best guess is we'll use the REST semantics and just send method, URI, and args in a WebSocket message and expect a response.
dodger··on [dead]
Fog Creek!

http://www.fogcreek.com/Careers.html

Software Developer Systems Engineer Front-End Designer/Developer Intern in software development (Summer 2012)

dodger··on Format string vulnerability found in 'sudo'
c is terrifying.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HComputers are terrifying.
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Yep! We intend to use our shiny, well-organized REST API for future development and probably port existing functionality to it, too!
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
That's great!
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Agreed, it made some necessary, non-backward-compatible changes as a result of being such a young project. I think it is likely that we will upgrade to a newer version soon.
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
We worked around the bug (which only happened when we were doing REALLLY long queries when we disconnected a client) and moved to Linux, where the bug does not exist. Awesome sysadmin Tim GDB'd into Mongo and figured out that it was an issue with SpiderMonkey, fixed in later versions.
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Actually, those have been great (and thank you for making them)! We had an outage during beta because somebody forgot to wrap an array comprehension assignment (CoffeeScript) and we didn't test right. Backbone has been really good, and while we had some complaints, I think many have been resolved in more recent versions - we're on something ancient.
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Socket.io: https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/686

MongoDB (on FreeBSD): https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3927

Redis: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/91

. . . are a few.

dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
I took it to mean "be forward-thinking rather than conservative."
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Right now? Just what we can get out of MongoDB. We need better search, and it should be coming soon. Vote it up! https://trello.com/card/board/better-search/4d5ea62fd76aa113...
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Today I'd consider going with a service, but first I'd see how https://github.com/LearnBoost/websocket.io looks. Most of our problems have been with abstractions in the socket.io client and scaling issues with server process chatter. The chatter shouldn't be necessary with websockets-only.
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
- Daniel is going to write another post detailing this. The answer is that when you combine CoffeeScript and a good async library, you can indeed get rid of that stuff.

- MoNsteR? =)

dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
Funny story, I found this particular lib the same day as Daniel wrote some code that was an exact drop-in replacement for its 'parallel' function. So he says 'Yes, let's use that one, as I understand and approve of its approach.'
dodger··on The Trello Tech Stack
I meant to link that. Now it's linked in the post, and it's here: https://github.com/caolan/async
dodger··on How Trello is different
Soon! So soon! Also, there's a neat project called node-trello that uses the API, and one of their example scripts backs up all of the boards for an org: https://github.com/lmatteis/node-trello/blob/master/example_...
dodger··on How Trello is different
We had a connection bug 3 weeks ago that could have caused changes to not sync. If you still have any windows that are not syncing, please email support@trello.com as soon as you can.
dodger··on Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together
Load balancer config issue, should be all set now.
dodger··on Subcases and Hierarchy
I think the multi-select in the grid view is what you're looking for to make that easy; both shift-select and control select work when clicking on grid rows. Not the easiest thing to find, but really useful.
dodger··on Security hole: only the first 8 characters in password matter
Been fixed for ages.