Spending $5k to learn how database indexes work

How we got here At Superwall we’re building an SDK to help App Developers increase their revenue by showing the right offer to the right person at the right time. Follow me on twitter for little tips and articles like this one. To deliver this service, we need to keep track of all of our customer’s users, the end users. To keep the numbers simple, assume we’re working with 5 companies who each have ~5k downloads a day, that’s roughly 25k downloads a day, or 750k users in a month.

Read More

When not to learn anything

I love learning, it’s probably the most basic desire underpinning so much of what I do. I take pride in it too, missing an opportunity to ponder and construct meaning seems almost like a dereliction of duty. It turns out that mindset In fact, I love it so much, it’s super difficult for me to turn it off. Ironically, the hardest thing for me to learn is when to “stop learning” and accept noise for the noise that it is, instead of trying to tease some small bit of signal out of it.

Read More

Troubleshooting Apple Captive Portal Problems

TL;DR: The Wi-Fi was blocking my custom DNS settings, so I connected on my iPhone, viewed the DNS servers that DHCP configured automatically and set the manually. Recently had the pleasure of fighting against hotel Wi-Fi. It’s a simple captive portal that only requires you to accept the TOS but could not connect to anything. First clue: I tried to curl google and got the response curl: (6) Could not resolve host: google.

Read More