As the founder of Smarty, Jonathan provides a great deal to the company. Not only is Jonathan incredibly skilled technically, he also has the incredible leadership ability to see the bigger picture and make the right decision for the future.
When Jonathan first started studying for a degree in Computer Science, he quickly noticed that the required readings were either books that he had already read, or books written by authors that he personally knew. Jonathan quickly realized that, while a college degree might be the path normally taken, his skills were already up to the task of trying things out on his own. He soon started successfully consulting for ecommerce companies at the very beginnings of ecommerce, and found that his instincts about his education were correct.
During this same time, Jonathan not only built several ecommerce platforms for other companies, but he started to experiment with entrepreneurship himself. It was during this time that he realized that companies are as good as the people that are in them. At the time, many companies simply thought of employees as a commodity. Jonathan, however, saw that if you treat employees as colleagues and treat those colleagues well, that they in turn would treat customers well. This vision for people practices has helped grow Smarty into a business that Jonathan and his colleagues truly care to see succeed.
Smarty has since grown into a highly successful company that not only strives to be on the cutting edge of people practices, but technical practices as well. Early on, Jonathan saw the benefit of distributed systems. He was both a pioneer in CQRS/Event Sourcing as well as even hosting a successful podcast all about distributed systems. It's thanks to this technical vision that Smarty is able to handle tens of billions of transactions each day with virtually no downtime.
Jonathan's path to success is one that many people might have been nervous to take. But Jonathan's ability to see the bigger picture, and a clear path to attaining his goals, has led him to create a successful company like Smarty. It's the ability to see that bigger picture that has led Jonathan to successfully pursue entrepreneurship, new technologies, and revolutionary people practices. And we all can't wait to see where Jonathan's leadership takes us next!
It's now been a few months since I decided that the kind of testing tools I wanted for Go programming hadn't yet been created (or I just hadn't found them yet. . . ). So, about 4 months ago I started work on GoConvey and a month later came the first release. The coolest thing about GoConvey (other than the clean DSL, comprehensive set of built-in assertions, and the fact that it integrates fully with go test) is the built-in auto-reloading web UI that reports your test results to your web browser whenever a relevant file is saved (HTML5 notifications included).
Throughout my many years of leading tech companies, I’ve immersed myself in the varying shifts in technology’s job market. However, the 2024 tech hiring market presents significant challenges for both companies and candidates, stemming from the rapid evolution of the industry, a shortage of skilled talent, workforce preferences for remote work options, increased competition, and a growing emphasis on cultural fit and soft skills. To navigate these challenges successfully, finding strategic approaches for employers is crucial.
Comcast's evil twinWe love our movies and our television. After a hard day at work, many Americans like to enjoy some downtime with a good TV show or movie. When technology advanced in the 1980s in the form of video cassette tapes, this gave us a new choice for how and when we consumed media. From this innovation came a natural outgrowth: the video store. Virtually every town in America had one. The stores weren't glamorous, but we came. We came because we value our ability to choose. Before long there came the video megastore: Blockbuster.
At approximately 1:30 PM Mountain Time (3:30 PM Eastern) on November 13, 2018, we observed a significant latency spike from our external monitoring tools that we configured to access our load balancing tier of our cloud-based APIs. These monitoring tools provide full, end-to-end testing and are meant to simulate a complete user experience with our application. By design our systems can easily process in excess of 25x the usual amount of traffic we receive. We do this because of our customer usage patterns wherein we may observe a 10-fold increase in traffic within a short period of time—usually a few minutes or even a few seconds.
One topic that seems to come up repeatedly on Stack Overflow or other online forums is the topic of how to go get private dependencies. Specifically, if I have a private Git repository on Github or Bitbucket, how do I bring that code locally via the go get tool such that automated builds can produce a clean, consistent build without interaction from a user? This problem is largely solved for public Github dependencies but continues to be a challenge for private dependencies. To reiterate, if you're only cloning publicly available dependencies, you probably won't be reading this post.
TLS (and its predecessor SSL) are cryptographic protocols that provide authentication and data encryption for clients connecting with web servers. As new vulnerabilities are discovered, older cryptographic protocol versions are deprecated to maintain secure environments. On Tuesday, January 21, 2020, Smarty will require clients to use TLSv1. 2 or greater to connect with Smarty APIs without interruption. Clients using TLSv1. 0 or TLSv1. 1 will no longer be able to connect. Please refer to our documentation for more information: https://www.
