Dan McKinley
Math, Programming, and Minority Reports

Design for Continuous Experimentation: Talk and Slides
December 22nd, 2012

Here’s a video of my most recent talk, “Design for Continuous Experimentation.” I first presented this at the Warmgun 2012 conference in San Francisco. The video here is a reprise of it from Etsy Labs in Brooklyn.

The slides are here:

When I was invited to talk at the “Conference of Measurable Design,” I took the title somewhat literally. I did my best to describe the process that we aspire to at Etsy when we do redesigns or product work more generally. It wasn’t my intention to pretend that we always succeed at this, so I made sure to include an example of us screwing up royally. I hope you enjoy it.

As an aside, I have redone this site for about the fifth time in the eight years it’s existed. This time, I was careful enough to reboot with a writing backlog in place. So hopefully I have a slightly better chance of keeping things going for a while.

My Magnum Opus
July 8th, 2010

I got paid to make this. That makes me a professional Actor.

Two New Projects
May 24th, 2010

Ahoy! I have two new projects up on github.

• oplogutils - A set of utilities for manipulating the MongoDB oplog.
• etsy-python - A Python library for using the Etsy API.

The python library is pretty trivial and self-explanatory, but I realized that I had copied it into enough projects that it deserved to be in setuptools.

The rationale for oplogutils is a little involved. Basically, this is what you need in some worst-case recovery scenarios. Those scenarios will be explained in more detail by John Allspaw and myself in upcoming posts on Code as Craft.