We’re excited to welcome Jacob Haven to the Ansaro engineering team! He is a security engineer and Go aficionado who has spent the last 5 years working on backend systems, focusing on cryptography, authentication/authorization, and secure protocols. Jacob is passionate about creating clear, clean code and systems with security built in from the start. In his free time, he enjoys motorcycling, camping, backpacking, playing board games, and taking his dog Tyrion for walks.

Jacob will initially be responsible for growing our GraphQL APIs, improving the robustness and security of our cloud infrastructure, as well as architecting new product features. While getting to know him over the past few weeks, I’ve really enjoyed the many Pro Tips™ for writing better Go and his keen observations on how to make our product and company even better.

Welcome to the team, Jacob!

We’re excited to welcome Ben Goldberg to Ansaro as our first engineering hire! He joins us after a successful few years with Originate. His attention to detail and eagerness to learn made him an obvious choice for our team. He’s excited to help us further our mission to improve interviewing, especially our focus on reducing bias in the interviewing process.

Since graduating from Claremont McKenna College where he majored in Computer Science and Economics, Ben has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area, currently in Berkeley. …

I mentioned in our last post that we are using Flow for static type checking to avoid common errors. In our React apps, we use a Babel plugin to strip the type annotations and make browser-compatible bundles. There are other times, such as Node.js services or Google Cloud Functions, where we want to write and run plain JavaScript that does not need to be compiled. Flow’s comment-based syntax allows us to have static type checking without compiling 🎉

Let’s take a look at an example shopping cart that calculates the total of items after a discount has been applied.

Welcome to the Ansaro Engineering publication! We’ll be sharing our learnings from building a new product from scratch and the engineering decision-making process behind important features. Follow our main publication to learn about people analytics and how data science can help with workforce decisions. Machine learning will be a common topic for both publications, but here you can expect deeper technical and operational insights.

What are we building?

Ansaro’s first product will help organizations bring structure to their interview process. We are aiming to make recruiters more efficient and teams more coordinated all while collecting data that will power predictions about applicants and allow…

Many apps need configuration to connect to a database or send requests to error reporting or analytics services. When you’re developing your app on your laptop, you might connect to a database at localhost. When you deploy your app to a hosting provider, you’ll likely want to connect somewhere else.

let databaseHost = "localhost";if (!isLocal) {
  databaseHost = "example.dblayer.com";
}

There are a couple problems with this approach. First, you’ll need to keep adding specific cases for every environment (e.g. qa, staging, sams-staging). Second, all of your sensitive data like database passwords are in plain text in version control…

For the last ~2 years, I’ve been using Terraform to manage mostly AWS infrastructure. It has allowed me to know exactly what resources I’ve provisioned, save time by using modules for common configurations, and have a (probably false) sense of security that I can replicate everything in another region with a single variable change. Terraform is pretty great.

Last week, I started transferring some domains to a new registrar. I had been keeping DNS records with my old registrar. Manually copying and pasting records between domain registrars would be tedious and I’d have to do it all over again if…