On the operations team at Conductor, automation is our watchword. Most of the time, the systems we automate are made of software, but this post is about a project I worked on to automate a task in the physical world, ... Read More »
5 Things You Might Not Know About IntelliJ
Most of you know that IntelliJ is a kick-ass Java editor. And most of you are right – it is! It kicks ass. But what many of you may not know about our beloved IDE is that it has much ... Read More »
Enums in distributed systems
And another thing… Enums. Every software engineer has seen them. Maybe it was in your introductory programming class. Maybe it was at your first software engineering job. Or perhaps you saw them when reading an API spec or working on ... Read More »
In Defense of the Commit Message
It’s time to acknowledge an inconvenient truth: For an industry full of perfectionists, our commit messages suck. Open up your software’s source repository and issue a command that’ll output your most recent commit message. In git, our DVCS-of-choice here at ... Read More »
Writer’s Block? 5 Blog Post Ideas for Developers
Editor’s note: Chris Le is a software engineer at Conductor but he’s also a whiz at SEO, having spent the better part of a decade building search marketing expertise in his professional and personal life. As such, the suggestions below ... Read More »
Engineering Motherhood: One Developer’s Attempt to Hack Parenting
I am a software engineer and a mom. At work, I build tools that help people make great decisions about SEO. At home, I am learning to guide the development of my 1-year-old daughter, Maple. When Maple first came home ... Read More »
Making the Leap to Require.js at Conductor
Much has been written about the benefits of Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) script loaders like Require.js for large-scale JavaScript applications. There’s the boost to testability and maintainability, the clear dependency graphs, the deliverance from script tag sorting hell. As with any useful ... Read More »
Internal IT Automation With Puppet
When your company’s growing like a bean stalk on steroids (and weight gain supplements) and you live by Lean principles and practice JIT operations, you need to figure out how to efficiently manage a rapidly growing staff, and the IT ... Read More »
Radio Free Conductor
I got this idea from Dave, one of the engineers on our application team. It was during his interview, actually — we were talking about the time we’d both spent in the game industry, how the hours and work were ... Read More »