Customer data infrastructure is a type of tool for saving analytics and information about your customers. The company that is best known in this category is Segment, a very popular API company. This customer data is used for making all kinds of decisions around product roadmap, pricing, and design. RudderStack is a company built around

Matterport is a company that builds 3-D imaging for the inside of buildings, construction sites, and other locations that require a “digital twin.” Generating digital images of the insides of buildings has a broad spectrum of applications, and there are considerable engineering challenges in building such a system. Matterport’s hardware stack involves a camera built

There are many bad recipe web sites. Every time I navigate to a recipe website, it feels like my browser is filling up with spyware. The page loads slowly, everything seems broken, I can feel the 25 different JavaScript adtech tags interrupting each other. Whether I am searching for banana bread or a spaghetti sauce

A credit score is a rating that allows someone to qualify for a line of credit, which could be a loan such as a mortgage, or a credit card. We are assigned a credit score based on a credit history, which could be related to work history, rental payments, or loan repayments.  One problem with

Social distancing has been imposed across the United States. We are running an experiment unlike anything before it in history, and it is likely to have a lasting impact on human behavior. By looking at location data of how people are moving around today, we can examine the real-world impacts of social distancing. SafeGraph is

Dropbox is a consumer storage product with petabytes of data. Dropbox was originally started on the cloud, backed by S3. Once there was a high enough volume of data, Dropbox created its own data centers, designing hardware for the express purpose of storing user files.  Over the last 13 years, Dropbox’s infrastructure has developed hardware,

“Data stream” is a word that can be used in multiple ways. A stream can refer to data in motion or data at rest.  When a stream is data in motion, an endpoint is receiving new pieces of data on a continual basis. Each new data point is sent over the wire and captured by

Redis is an in-memory object storage system that is commonly used as a cache for web applications. This core primitive of in-memory object storage has created a larger ecosystem encompassing a broad set of tools. Redis is also used for creating objects such as queues, streams, and probabilistic data structures. Machine learning systems also need

For many applications, a transactional MySQL database is the source of truth. To make a MySQL database scale, some developers deploy their database using Vitess, a sharding system built on top of Kubernetes.  Jiten Vaidya and Anthony Yeh work at PlanetScale, a company that focuses on building and supporting MySQL databases sharded with Vitess. Their

A data warehouse is a system for performing fast queries on large amounts of data. A data lake is a system for storing high volumes of data in a format that is slow to access. A typical workflow for a data engineer is to pull data sets from this slow data lake storage into the