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sboak

165 karma · joined October 14, 2010

VP, Product Design @datadoghq. Developer Experience (DX) designer. Co-host of @dontmakemecode. Try my product. Twitter: @sboak www.stephenboak.com
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sboak··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2017)
Datadog | Engineering, Product, Product Design | NYC, Paris, Remote | datadoghq.com/jobs-engineering

At Datadog, we’re on a mission to build the best monitoring platform in the world. We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—and high availability, providing always-on alerting, visualization, and tracing for our customers' infrastructure and applications around the globe.

We're looking for front-end and back-end engineers, product designers, and data scientists to join the team

sboak··on Redesigning the smartphone dial pad
this assumes that phone numbers matter
sboak··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2017)
Datadog is hiring in NYC, Paris, and remote https://www.datadoghq.com/careers/

Engineering (almost 40 positions open): https://www.datadoghq.com/jobs-engineering/

Marketing: https://www.datadoghq.com/jobs-marketing/

Sales: https://www.datadoghq.com/jobs-sales/

General & admin: https://www.datadoghq.com/jobs-general-administrative/

sboak··on New data visualisation shows the beating heart of London
There was a similar project done for the NYC subway system done 6 years ago: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=69...
sboak··on Show HN: Instant alerts for applications in distress
We have a nice write-up in Stackshare about our stack: http://stackshare.io/opsee-co/how-opsee-chose-a-container-or...
sboak··on Show HN: Instant alerts for applications in distress
Thanks! It's wonderful to hear that the thing our team worked harder on than anything else is appreciated :)
sboak··on Show HN: Instant alerts for applications in distress
The biggest difference is in the way we handle checks inside AWS. When you add our EC2 Instance we automatically discover your infrastructure and track changes. When you create health checks for groups and other dynamic AWS resources (ELBs, RDS, ECS, etc...) we track membership and automatically update your checks with no maintenance.
sboak··on Show HN: Instant alerts for applications in distress
Hi, I'm Steve and I run product at Opsee. There are a few important differences: 1. The rich assertion language in Opsee means we're checking for more than availability - we're looking for correct responses too. This makes us more useful for checking APIs, since services can fail and still return a 200 2. We're measuring round-trip time for every check - Pingdom charges a lot more for this than their standard checks 3. Usability. Our integrations with Slack and Pagerduty are really simple to set up, our UI is responsive and well...better 4. We can also health check inside your AWS environment when you add our EC2 Instance, giving you more complete coverage. We actually do a lot of cool stuff inside AWS.
sboak··on Why suburbia sucks
James Howard Kunstler gave an incredibly sharp, funny talk called "The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs" on both the history and design problems of the suburbs. https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
sboak··on Sketch 3.7 released
I've been using Sketch for over a year now, and though it's been a valuable tool (and the integration with Framer is wonderful) it continues to be plagued by bugs and crashes in even mundane daily use. They proudly announce new features while ignoring the toll these issues take on the designers who depend on their software. I'm posting this in the hope that they'll acknowledge and address some of these issues quickly.

Here are screen grabs of just a few of the most obvious bugs I've encountered recently: https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651518759690108928 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/704447216191078400 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/676568026020372481 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/664540876606017536 https://twitter.com/sboak/status/651897512538693632

sboak··on Opsee – Continuously test your services and deploy with confidence
Thanks! Fixed.
sboak··on Opsee – Continuously test your services and deploy with confidence
Yes, definitely. That will become more clear when we launch support for RDS/SQL health checks in the next few weeks. The biggest differentiator between us and these OSS tools is ease-of-use and maintenance. With Opsee there are no configurations to manage, YAML files to create, or agents to run. Setup is dead simple, and you never need to maintain health checks. Our checks react instantly to changes in your infrastructure.
sboak··on Opsee – Continuously test your services and deploy with confidence
Co-founder here. The big difference, compared with tools like Pingdom, is that we're operating inside your environment. We can tell you where the failure happened and give you tools to fix it. We're like Pingdom for microservice environments, helping developers know their services, inside or outside the firewall, are working as expected.
sboak··on Monitoring Microservices with Synthetic Transactions in Go
I'm going to risk a plug since our service is highly relevant. If you're using AWS, Opsee will let you define service-level health checks and automatically detect instance membership. You can set detailed assertions on response bodies, including JSON keys, to verify that your services are responding as expected. This all works inside your environment, running checks from an instance we spin up. More info at opsee.com
sboak··on Graphic Presentation (1939)
It's fascinating to see a book approaching data visualization from first principles, without any preconceived notions or the baggage and confusion of modern tools and techniques
sboak··on Old New Jersey Factory to House Earth’s Largest Vertical Farm
This is the best thing to come out of New Jersey since Jon Stewart
sboak··on Ask HN: Favorite podcasts?
For Design topics, check out 99% Invisible (http://99percentinvisible.org/) and Design Details (http://www.designdetails.fm/). I feel silly mentioning This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/) since it seems like everyone's heard of it, but the quality of the show is just so incredible I can't leave it out. There's the quality of TAL's storytelling and then there's everything else... Radiolab is also incredible (http://www.radiolab.org/) for more technical/scientific topics, but it's definitely not specific to engineering/software.
sboak··on Ask HN: Designing Useful Dashboards
Before looking at arbitrary visualization patterns, have a look at some useful precedents. Truecar, for example, (https://www.truecar.com/prices-new/honda/fit-pricing/) visualizes similar data in a clean and readable way. Google Flights might be another (https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=JFK;d=2015-03...).

There are some visualization patterns that might be useful to you for this exercise, like interactive small multiples (http://projects.flowingdata.com/tut/linked_small_multiples_d...) to compare suppliers' prices over time. Think a bit about the trends in the data you tease out (as you say, thinks like prices over time and comparing alternatives) and go in search of examples that try to achieve similar goals.

sboak··on A Photographer Who Tinkers with Time
His "stainless" series, particularly this shot of the 6 train in NYC, is incredible: http://www.opiomgallery.com/cspdocs/artwork/images/adam_magy...

I keep checking for a place to buy prints online but they don't seem to be available.

sboak··on The Twilight of the Indoor Mall
Urban planners have been predicting the demise of malls for years. 10 years ago James Kunstler gave a hilarious, biting talk on "the ghastly tragedy of the suburbs" in which he suggests some great ways of repurposing them for urbanization. It's a fantastic video: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
sboak··on Gobble Promises to Help Customers Make Delicious Meals in 10 Minutes or Less
Good point. I didn't really think about how that charge went through without finishing checkout.
sboak··on Gobble Promises to Help Customers Make Delicious Meals in 10 Minutes or Less
My experience with Gobble went as follows: I was going to do their trial but bailed before completing checkout because their terms automatically subscribe you for weekly meals. I got a call a few days later saying that I was being sent the meals anyway and that, also, they weren't sure which meals I was supposed to be sent so they might be wrong. No offer to refund my money. They said the meals would be arriving the next day. It's now over a week later and I never received the incorrect meals that I never actually ordered but was charged for. I emailed customer service again about this and haven't heard back. Caveat emptor.
sboak··on The Global Fossil Record
good jub dietrich
sboak··on An archive of all-fiction pulpwood magazines from 1896 - 1946
One of the highlights is reading the long-copy advertising on the back covers
sboak··on New Creative Tools on Instagram
No kitschy launch video?
sboak··on Automating production at China factory reduces 80% of workforce
circle of life
sboak··on Show HN: movies.io — torrent search like it should be
It needs to be able to distinguish the different types (DVDRIP, TS, etc...)
sboak··on "Take a Photo; It’ll Last Longer"
I just take a standard photo with the iPhone camera and add the image to Instagram from my library when I care about preserving the original.
sboak··on Code School now open to the public
I haven't watched any Code School videos yet, but learning to code by video has always been my method of choice. I've been using the (awesome) videos from Lynda.com for years now and have always found them concise and helpful with really good content.