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How not to design a website

Etrade is one of the largest stock trading service providers in the US. One would think they want to make it easy for their customers to trade. Guess not :). I recently logged in to check on my account and place an order. Capital One recently sold their stock trading portfolio to Etrade (why???), so I didn’t get a chance to get oriented with the etrade interface…

So I logged in and was presented a good overview of the account.

Good so far.. I want to place a trade. what do I click?.. let me try the detailed account view

Hmm.. no luck.. How about the orders menu? That sounds like a place where one can place a trade

Nope.. that doesn’t even remotely look like a place I can place an order..

I am amazed at how companies get away with this..

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HOW TO : Set $GOPATH

Been dabbling in go recently and I was surprised that the default install doesn’t setup the $GOPATH environment variable.

If you are running it on a Linux box, here is how your can set the $GOPATH variable

Add the following lines to ~/.bashrc file 

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin:$GOPATH/bin

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Overheard : BODMAS

Trying to sharpen my programming skills :). Just heard about BODMAS and mind blown about the simplicity of the acronym. 

Essentially BODMAS is a simple way to remember the order a programming language (that follows this standard) processes operators in a statement.

BODMAS = 
Bracket, Of, Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction

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Overheard : Call to action

I don’t even recall where I heard this :)..  but it stuck with me for me to write it down

For somebody to do something.. three things much happen at once. The person must want do do it, they must be able to and they must be prompted to do it.

A trigger – the prompt for the action – is effective only when the person is highly motivated, or the task is very easy. If the task is hard, people end up frustrated; if they’re not motivated, they get annoyed.

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Overheard : Paradoxical Commandments

My sister shared this awesome “thought” by Dr. Kent M. Keith.

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

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Optimizing cache infrastructure

I love when engineering teams share their tricks of trade for other organizations to benefit. While this might seem counter-intuitive, sharing knowledge makes the entire ecosystem better.

Etsy‘ engineering team does a great job of publishing their architecture, methodologies and code at https://codeascraft.com.

This particular article on how they optimize their caching infrastructure (https://codeascraft.com/2017/11/30/how-etsy-caches/) is pretty enlightening. I always thought the best method to load balance objects (app hits, cache requests, queues etc) to hosts was to use mod operations. In this blog post Etsy’ team talk about using consistent hashing instead of modulo hashing.

At a high level, it allows cache nodes to fail and not impact the overall performance of the application drastically in addition to making it easy to scale the number of nodes. This method is useful when you have a large amount of cache nodes.

More reference links

  • http://www.tom-e-white.com/2007/11/consistent-hashing.html
  • https://www.toptal.com/big-data/consistent-hashing
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing

 

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Overheard : Attitude

Saw this on a t-shirt a girl was wearing recently

Let me pretend I care…

OK, I’am done

:). Simple but such a strong message.