How I built a Slack controlled lamp to minimize accidental Zoom guests

By now, if you have a home office, this must have happened to you.

Your partner/roommate/children must have office-crashed right in your important presentation.

This has happened to me, more than once, I admit. After the third time, I realized I had to engineer something to keep our home harmony. This is what I built.

Introducing the Status Jar

R3 is an annual event to Reflect, Refine and Reinvent Nextdoor. R3 goes beyond a hackathon by being more of an idea-thon. Everyone in the company, from engineers to sales to Neighborhood Operations, gets together to reimagine our product.

We asked some folks why R3 is important to Nextdoor:

“R3 provides the opportunity for everyone to step out of their comfort zones and try building things out of their day to day work.”

“R3 gives you the opportunity to work with people outside of your team and get together on a similar idea.”

“R3 is a chance for people to…

(this post is adapted from an earlier article: https://engblog.nextdoor.com/what-is-the-technology-behind-nextdoor-5b74b3efcc31)

On a typical day at Nextdoor, we are:

• Deploying to production 12–15 times
• Inserting billions of rows to our Postgres and DynamoDB tables
• Handling millions of user sessions concurrently
• Adding new neighborhoods to Nextdoor (over 247,000 neighborhoods worldwide)
• Getting ready or launching new countries (we just went live in Canada!)

How do we do this? Keep reading for a behind-the-scenes look into how we scale at Nextdoor (psst, we’re hiring!).

Serving Stack

Python Stack

Python is our Lingua-franca both for our serving stack and for our offline processes.

We make use of the Django Framework…

You probably have seen this somewhere while playing with open ssh. These cryptic characters are called Randomart

Images taken from What is randomart?

So why is this interesting to us?

Well lets suppose you have a long list of keys… like the one at your servers ~/.ssh/known_hosts/ and you want to visualy check if you have a duplicate one.

try this:

$ssh-keygen -lv -f ~/.ssh/known_hosts | less

And you will get a nice random art like this: (look how easy is to spot the duplicate one)

Which is easier to read than the original output

Also if…

If you’ve ever been to San Francisco and are observant enough, you’ve likely seen these small orange fishes everywhere.

The Koi fish.

According to Japanese legend, there was once a particularly determinded Koi fish. Despite the warnings of all the other koi fish in his pond, this heedless little fish wanted to swim to the top of a gigantic waterfall. He knew it was nearly impossible, but he wanted to do it regardless.

So the fish went upstream on his own. After a long and arduous journey, he reached the base of the waterfall. Summoning all his strength, the mightly…

Rails is probably the best thing that happened to Ruby, but it can also be holding it back.

Hiring Freezes, Javascript Sprinkles, Majestic Monoliths, will work great for you, if you happen to be Basecamp. These strategies require a specific Work Culture, Product and Engineering skillset to be properly executed.

You are not Google and as that article says, what’s valuable of reading about Google and Basecamp’s is not their decisions, but their thought process.

For example, “Are Monoliths better than an API + Single Page App? ” is not the real question you should be asking, it should be…

1. Sarah Mei: Writing code is not the only way to help Open Source

Railsbridge is a 1.5 day workshop that helps women to learn how make their first “Hello World app”. I’ve met dozens of engineers who got their start on one of these workshops and I’m sure there are hundreds more.

Railsbridge is demonstrating that the talent is out there, they just need a nudge in the right direction. Our weekends are better spent helping develop this talent than writing “yet another MVC framework” or putting “fiber-channel networks” on a basement.

2. Sandi Metz: The only requirements for great software are discipline and pride on your craft.

“We want to do our best work, and we want the work we do to have meaning. And, all else…

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