Over the last few years I’ve collected a bunch of questions that have largely sat in my head that I tend to bring up during an interview process. This was born out of a google doc I put together for some old coworkers who were looking for new jobs and I started sharing it with more and more people. These particular set of questions are mainly geared towards startups but there are sections that apply to any type of company.

On July 3rd, I decided I was taking a break from social media. I deleted Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat from my iPhone, iPad and removed any links to them in my browser (I didn’t delete my profiles). A full month seemed like a good amount of time to detox from all of these and see what would change in my life without them. The first couple of days I was certainly fidgety, kept looking down at my phone and not knowing what to do with it.

Over the last 9 years, I’ve had a few things in my life that have benefited me both professionally and personally that have all tied back to Flickr. In 2003, Canon had released the first sub-$1000 digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS 300D aka the EOS Digital Rebel. The 300D paved the way for entry level consumers to get involved with the world of digital SLRs, previously the cheapest option was the Canon 10D, available at $2,000.

For a hack week project at Chartbeat, I hooked my Philip’s Hue light bulbs into PagerDuty so whenever I get paged my lights will start flashing. Read about the hack over on the PagerDuty blog

I wrote a couple blog posts for work diving into what we learned optimizing our performance in EC2. You can read both parts over at http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/01/02/part-1-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/ and http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/02/12/part-2-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/