If you know me, used to work with me, or are unfazed by the ill-considered, hotheaded tirades I infrequently post here, please consider getting in touch. If you do, and it works out, here is what I personally feel comfortable promising you:
- You will work on a relatively small team on one of the largest websites in the world.
- Your work will be interesting. There will be problems of scale that you just don't have at most other places. You will get to use the cool kid NoSQL databases, learn about web operations, and other fun stuff.
- You will like your coworkers, and they will be uniformly brilliant and talented.
- You will work on something that by and large makes a positive impact on people's lives.
- You will not miss your stinky financial industry job even a little bit.
Must love dogs.
Tags: Etsy
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Inspired by Peter Norvig, I have created a quick hack to generate haikus from Etsy listing titles. Check it out here.
Technical details for those who are interested:
- The listings are downloaded from the Etsy API by an offline process, and stuffed into a MongoDB database if their titles are either five or seven syllables.
- The CMU Pronunciation Dictionary handles the syllable wrangling.
- The frontend is a very simple Django application.
All in all, about three or four hours of effort. Note that Etsy has nothing to do with these haikus, and doesn’t endorse this app.
Tags: Django, Etsy, Hack, MongoDB, Python, Web
Posted in Eccentric | 2 Comments »
Occasionally, I write things for Etsy's news blog thingamajig, the Storque. If this site isn't enough excitement for you, you can see what I am doing over there by following this link. End communication.
Tags: Etsy, Web
Posted in Eccentric | 1 Comment »
In front of City Hall, a man plays the steel drums in front of the ZipCar tent. Increased access to the birthright of every citizen (the automobile) was advocated. Free watermelon was served.
Nearby a person reminds us (via bumper sticker) to drive safely, while parked in a painted bike lane.
The placard in his window lets us know that this person is a hero, rather than an ordinary disgrace.
Back at Etsy Labs, time for the deliveries (that's the sidewalk).
Also near the Labs, signs that Brooklyn's repressed SUV-owning minority are joining forces and taking back the sidewalks.
Meanwhile, on Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard, a woman is brutally killed.
If it occurs to anyone that traffic should not be hurtling through Brooklyn at speed, they don't speak up.
Tags: Angry, Etsy, New York, Tilting at Windmills
Posted in Angst | No Comments »
Hey, by the way, the last post is likely to be my last Windows-oriented post for the forseeable future. I have recently quit the financial sector and will be starting a fantastically cool new job here in a few weeks. I no longer have a Windows machine at home at all, so unless I take up Mono, expect a lot of posts that mention emacs from now on. I think this will be for the best, since I've been kind of bored and nonplussed with .NET stuff lately, F# notwithstanding.
Giving up on Microsoft development entirely was a little bittersweet until someone showed me XMLScript a week or two ago–clearly, a lot of people in that world are out of their god damned minds. Best of luck writing xhtml-serving web applications defined in xml markup with client script written declaratively in more xml, also exposing xml web services to rich client applications defined largely in XAML, updated automatically as defined in xml configuration files, to those of you lucky enough to get to do this.
Tags: Etsy, Financial Industry, Languages
Posted in Web | 5 Comments »
