Published in The Startup·PinnedMember-onlyA Beginner’s Guide to Role Inheritance and Policies for PostgresEvery Friday evening when I sit down to build out a new database schema, I always find myself looking up the same questions so I collected them here to save myself the trouble. I’m calling this a “beginner’s guide” because every time I build something on Postgres I learn new…Postgres7 min read
Mar 5, 2020Lambdas in ProductionI have been using Lambda in production for about four years now personally, and three years professionally at Volta. Initially, I shipped Lambdas because it was easier than managing servers. At Volta, we now exclusively use server-less services because they are the smartest option for our workloads if we remember…Serverless5 min read
Dec 26, 2019How to ace my Software Engineering interviewOver the past few years, I’ve taken part in hundreds of interviews. I’ve been both interviewer and interviewee over the phone, on video chat, and in person more times than I can remember and I’ve refined my tactics along the way. No matter the method or the role I have…Open Source4 min read
Nov 24, 2019Monorepos with Yarn Workspaces and CircleCIWe’re starting to explore monorepositories. Not in a big, “let’s chuck all our services into one repo” kind of way, but in a smaller, “let’s merge some related services to save some cognitive overhead”, kind of way. …Java Script7 min read
Dec 7, 2018How to build an entire GraphQL backend using AWS Lambda and Postgraphile in under two seconds**It will actually take around an hour The best things about writing code is not having to write very much of it. …AWS5 min read
Aug 2, 2018Designing the most performant Row Level Security schema in PostgresIn an effort to write less application logic in my services and interfaces, (and out of pure laziness), I am persistently looking for performant strategies to bake access control directly into my schemas. …Postgres8 min read
Jun 5, 2018Our small team acts big with the help of Serverless and NoOpsOur team is small but our application is large. To balance this constraint, we have harnessed the power of managed services and an event-driven architecture to focus engineering cycles on core business logic. Initially, that means investing in infrastructure that will support new features and increasing scale. …Serverless6 min read
May 19, 2018Only in AustinI don’t make it back to Austin often since I left in the spring of ’16 so, when I returned recently for Eeyore’s Birthday, I made sure to make all the stops I miss most. This is a rundown of those and a few others I couldn’t make it to…Travel3 min read
Nov 11, 2017Practical Application of Row Level SecurityAn Experiment Giving Database Roles to Application Users — Update: I initially wrote thing a year ago while exploring Row Level Security in Postgres, but unpublished it due to performance concerns. I am republishing it now since new methods have come to light and it may serve as a useful reference. More update: I just finished a more thorough…Database5 min read
Jan 23, 2017Calculating Hourly Utilization in PostgreSQLI recently received a request from a member of the site sales team at Volta for hourly station utilization. This metric is interesting to me because it requires calculation, specifically the percentage of time when someone is charging at that station. Since our data is stored in PostgreSQL, why not…Sql5 min read
