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zbailey

50 karma · joined February 27, 2010

VP Products at Pardot Marketing Automation http://www.pardot.com
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zbailey··on Mandrill - Transactional Email from MailChimp
Looks awesome! I'm curious, there seem to be quite a few transactional mail services on the come-up these days, each with their own little bit of special sauce (SendGrid, Amazon SES, PostMark, et al).

If I were evaluating Mandrill in addition to those services, what are the main things I should focus on that really sets Mandrill apart from those other providers?

zbailey··on Scala on Heroku
Oops, thanks for correcting me. I think the original article claimed it did use it, or at least something very similar - it looks like Herkou has tweaked their article and pulled that link.
zbailey··on Scala on Heroku
I love Heroku's little "language and community" section of these articles when they add a new supported platform. For example, the link to the explanation of Scala's Hindley-Milner type inference method (http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/what-is-hindley-milner-...) definitely taught me something new about the internals of Scala, and in general a new topic in Computer Science.

Congrats on shipping yet another supported platform!

zbailey··on Another Redis case: Centralized logging
We use syslog where I work, and I've always felt the same way, but never heard any suggestions for better options with as wide adoption, support, and background as syslog.

Out of pure curiosity, what do you see as the tool most likely to displace syslog in the future? Is there any alternative available that fixes most of these problems without rolling your own from pieces and parts?

zbailey··on ThriftDB a new service from the Octopart Guys
Sheer curiosity - why did you decide to go with solr instead of elastic search which seems easier to scale out, with much the same feature set?
zbailey··on Google Storage Now Available To Developers
A compelling reason for our use case to switch from S3 is their support for lots of buckets coupled with CNAME support:

http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html

Due to Amazon's limitation of 100 buckets per account and the coupling between bucket name and CNAME, hosting files for our clients and supporting custom CNAMEs has not been possible for us. If we were to move to Google Storage, it would be.

zbailey··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (May 2011)
Atlanta, GA - Pardot Marketing Automation (http://www.pardot.com)

Pardot is hiring software developers to help us build and maintain our Prospect Insight web application marketing automation system. This role will expose you to a variety of projects and allow you to significantly expand your development skill set. We pride ourselves with having an awesome work environment that includes large, dual monitors, fast machines, and a variety of operating system choices (Mac, Linux, and PC).

Responsibilities:

Back-end code development in PHP on symfony Front-end development using HTML + jQuery Unit testing (PHPUnit, etc) Technical documentation

Requirements:

B.A./B.S./M.S. with a strong academic record. One to five years of post-graduate programming experience. Strong interest in technology or marketing. Overall fluency in software development.

Please include the following in your cover letter when you apply:

In your favorite programming language, write a recursive function that takes in an integer n and outputs the first n numbers in the fibonacci sequence in order starting with 0.

Email zach.bailey@pardot.com and mention hacker news for preferential treatment :)

zbailey··on Coffee Joulies: Kickstarter project keeps your coffee at the right temperature
Disagree. A quick google shows most sources claim the optimal temperature for brewing coffee is somewhere between 195-205F (92-96C) which is certainly hot enough to cause first degree burns in your mouth.

Now certain herbal teas on the other hand are brewed at lower temperatures to keep from scalding the leaves. That may be what you're thinking?

I'm curious, what's your optimal temperature and how do you brew your joe?

zbailey··on Introducing Word Lens
I'm very surprised people have not mentioned this app does not work very well (if at all) when the phone is in any orientation other than straight up and down.

Why is it not possible for the developers to use the orientation sensor/gyroscope to accomodate for this? Many times it's easier to fit a bunch of text on the camera in landscape mode than the alternative. It's also a lot more natural for me to hold my phone in landscape mode when using the camera.

Just my $0.02 and congrats on all the hubbub. Can't wait for more languages :)

zbailey··on Ask HN: LinkedIn made me reset my password (my email was in the Gawker dump)
That is exactly what they're doing:

"As a proactive security measure, we've reached out to users potentially affected by the gawker breach to change their password."

http://twitter.com/#!/LinkedIn/status/14507486753062913

zbailey··on Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS
I believe a hosted zone simply corresponds to a single domain you want to host the DNS for.

If you've ever ran your own DNS server this would be equivalent to a "zone file": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_file

zbailey··on Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac
Hoping this is useful feedback, if the developers are here lurking. Agree/Disagree?

First, it looks absolutely great. I love the "tweetie"-ish UI. A very refreshing look and feel.

Hotkeys - very glad to see these already integrated, but wish they would have defaulted to the standard GMail hotkeys. Since your product is aimed at GMail users for now, I would go with those hotkeys

Scrolling - something weird is happening with the scrolling using a mouse wheel versus regular trackpad on my Macbook Pro. Feels inconsistent with other apps.

Windows - the message panel should be "docked" to the main window by default. a message/thread should only open in a new window when double clicked.

Search - fast (for me, small mailbox) and well done. great progressive disclosure with the options appearing above the results list.

Authoring - a more full-featured editor is a must, obviously. For a beta this is forgivable.

Preferences - getting to account-specific prefrences is unintuitive (double clicking on account)

All Mail/Labels - obviously a "must" in the left hand side if you're going after the GMail crowd.

Performance - performance starts to suffer if you add a larger account while it downloads/indexes your mail? My CPU was not pegged and I have an SSD so not sure what could be causing this slow down. Excessive paging?

NSStatusItem - not sure why this is necessary and I would rather not have it cluttering my status bar.

Unified Inbox - maybe not a 1.0 feature but a lot of people feel strongly about this. It's a must for anyone with more than 2 email accounts they have to juggle.

Message List - consider figuring out a way to show more messages on the left hand side, possibly by adding a preference for "include preview"

Overall, a very strong start and if you could get the above items worked out and a polished first version out I would happily pay you $20-$30 for this piece of software to replace my current thick mail client (postbox)

zbailey··on Tell HN: Seeking Cofounder for Twilio-based Startup
It's funny. The company I work for is doing exactly what you describe. Our product is called Wildfire Platform - http://www.wildfireplatform.com. It's really great to see other people that have similar ideas.

We're all about empowering grassroots movements and helping grassroots movements be more effective via exactly the methods you mention - competition and fun for the supporters. The "pressure" concept you mention is exactly like our "Personal Impact" analytics we keep that tracks (in a hierarchical fashion, even!) your actions and the actions of those that have recruited to help the movement, and that score is available for all to see similar to an XBox gamer score.

We also have a huge library of actions like the ones you mentioned - social media actions like updating your status or outreach actions like phonebanking and walking that all tie back in to our Platform.

And finally we have the organization piece you hit on - traditionally political campaigns and non-profits organize around geographic lines and then find the most active volunteers in those regions and that's exactly what we help our users do.

I'd love to talk to you more about your ideas for "Pressure" since it seems like you've mulled it over quite a bit - and of course we're always looking to add smart, motivated people to our team :)