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zmsmith

31 karma · joined April 22, 2010

Technical Product Manager at Yipit

@zmsmith

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zmsmith··on Show HN: PyEQS – query Elasticsearch like a Django Queryset
I work with Andrew at Yipit. As he mentioned in a comment below, we're using features of Elasticsearch that aren't (and probably shouldn't be) exposed by haystack, and some of the query building started to get a little messy.

I'm excited Andrew decided to work on this during our last hackathon and that now we're able to share it with the community.

We've been really happy with Elasticsearch. Hopefully this library will help more people leverage Elasticsearch in their python projects.

zmsmith··on How Yipit Scales Thumbnailing With Thumbor and Cloudfront
Looks like a nice service. We definitely would have considered it. Thumbor is very easy to administer though, and we already use/trust Cloudfront.
zmsmith··on Lessons Learned from a Redis Outage at Yipit
Here's a pattern I've been guilty of:

1. Set up an alert at a conservative usage to make sure nothing like this can happen

2. See alert and know you have plenty of time to fix the issue

3. Get distracted

4. Disk space disaster

We use AppFirst for our monitoring alerts. One thing they don't support is sending recurring alerts while something is over a threshold. They only send when thresholds are crossed.

Right now we're experimenting with PagerDuty reading the AppFirst alerts and then seeing it as an open issue.

I'd love to know what other people are using.

zmsmith··on Amazon AWS Free Usage Tier
times 12
zmsmith··on How Our Startup Got Featured on CNN
We _were_ using pinax.