Wire fraud in real-estate transactions is a BIG problem. This post discusses how to massively reduce the risk of wire fraud.
I’m addressing everyone in the real estate industry, agents, appraisers, escrow companies and anyone else who is involved in a real estate transaction. Those are the parties that need to improve their online security to prevent home buyers from being tricked into phishing attacks that lead to wire fraud.
I personally have been looking for a house lately and heard from my agent that wire fraud is a big problem. He could speak of multiple cases where the buyer wired multiple hundred thousand dollars or more to wire instructions that didn’t belong to the seller or the escrow company. Usually the money is just gone!!! …
Over the last year, we’ve grown Keepsafe Photo Vault from a technically simple app that imports photos from your camera roll into a sophisticated product that utilizes encryption, real-time sync, and other useful and cutting-edge technologies.
We made the decision to start expanding our engineering team a few months ago, and the process led us to think deeply about who, exactly, we need to find in order to scale out our vision and success. You can read more about that process here).
The result of the exercise was to prioritize the personal fulfillment of our team and split mobile development into two distinct projects: Application and Core. I want to use this post to explain the difference between the two. Technical experience isn’t the only thing that determines an engineer’s career trajectory, and I’d like for our future team members to think about the kind of work that makes them happy. …
Optimize Your Keywords
When we launched Keepsafe in the App Store in 12 languages, it was painful to research and optimize keywords for each market. Like many engineering teams, craftsmanship is in our blood! We built an internal tool to make the work easier and more efficient. It’s Keepsafe’s nifty App Store keyword optimization tool that we’re proud to share with app developers today.
When you launch an app in the App Store, you research keywords that people will use to find your app. Typically, you prioritize keywords by search volume and difficulty (ie. how much competition there is for the keyword). You can include keywords in your app title (up to 50 characters) and you have an additional 100 characters for keywords. There’s no benefit to using the same keyword twice in the title and keyword list. But you want to include every possible keyword with the best possible chance of being found by interested people. …
TLDR: After close to four years of developing aiohttp under Keepsafe’s repository, we’ve recently determined that aiohttp has matured to a point that would benefit from being hosted under aio-libs.
Over the past three years aiohttp has grown from a small internal web framework to a serious standalone project that makes asynchronous programming in web apps not just easy — but also pleasant.
It all started with Nikolay Kim writing the first version of Keepsafe’s backend. At the time we had 10 million people using Keepsafe, and we knew we needed to build something that would run smooth under load. Nikolay’s previous involvement working on asyncio led to the first version of aiohttp. …
Immer wieder werde ich von Leuten in Deutschland gefragt: Warum Silicon Valley, Software kannst du doch überall schreiben? Nach über drei Jahren Leben und Arbeiten im Silicon Valley habe ich ein ganz gutes Gefühl für die Unterschiede.
Zur vorherigen Frage: Ja, Software kann man auf der ganzen Welt entwickeln. Software-Firmen können jedoch deutlich besser im Silicon Valley aufgebaut werden, wie ein Blick auf Software-Firmen, die in den letzten 20 Jahren richtig erfolgreich waren, zeigt. Damit schließe ich bewusst jeden anderen Markt auf der Welt aus, ausgenommen China. Und wie immer gilt: Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel. SAP ist eine große Software-Firma aus Deutschland, es ist aber auch eine der wenigen, wenn nicht die einzige. …
The second to last regatta of the 2015 season in San Francisco Bay was won by a boat not usually in the top five. I later learned they are great sailors and it was their first win in the class since joining three years ago. They attributed it to excellent cooperation on board. Getting more boats to be better will improve racing for all of us. For this reason, I thought it might be worth writing out how we do our boat handling. I hope it will jump start new teams into the fleet and help others to improve. …
At the beginning of 2012 I started developing for mobile devices. Before that, I performed some graph visualization work and backend oriented development. In the software engineering world, I have grown accustomed to a sense of gravity, where by “gravity” I mean a certain set of basic ideas/laws you can rely on unconditionally on, similar to how you can rely on the planet’s gravity. In this post, I want to share some of the experiences we’ve had at KeepSafe that left us questioning our own notion of gravity in the software engineering world.
File Systems are unreliable
At KeepSafe we do a lot of file system operations; as our app is essentially a photo vault, dealing with the file system comes with the territory. However, we didn’t just run into issues with the photo files but with smaller files we store beside the photos. We ultimately found that many of the things we take for granted about how file system operations should behave don’t always hold. And when things break, they break in strange, unpredictable ways. Typically with my previous work I would never question the reliability of concrete things such as file systems — it’s what I would consider a part of the software engineering gravity idea. Unfortunately, we’ve seen massive file system related inconsistencies over time that forced us to adhere to a different mindset. …
This post describes our experience migrating the KeepSafe Android app to the new Gradle-based build system. This is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial.
In this post, I want to focus on some specific cases we have had problems with. This also represents the state of the build tools at the time of writing. Some of it might be outdated and no longer valid.
Why move from an existing solution?
When starting to build an application, it’s easy to pick the tool that least gets in your way. With KeepSafe, we started with the default choice at the time, which was building the project with Eclipse/Ant. This choice ended up not being ideal, however. As we grew and more and more people started working on the same thing, managing many different Android library projects became a massive pain. …
I’ve been programming Android applications for 2.5 years. I mainly work on the KeepSafe Hide pictures app but I also built our Hide SMS app and some other small private projects.
Over time, one problem I keep running into over and over again is dealing with resource bloat — which happens when you keep adding new resources but there’s no good way to remove the ones that are no longer in use. In a typical web project, resource bloat doesn’t really affect performance because the browser will only load what’s needed. …
TLDR: Implement A/B testing for your app in hours. Switchboard is a lightweight mobile A/B testing framework with consistent user segmentation. It can be used for A/B testing, stage rollout and remote configuration. It’s designed to server high traffic and be as flexible as possible. Released under the Apache License, you can download it from: http://www.github.com/KeepSafe/Switchboard
Problem: On mobile, you can’t just simply roll back
Many mobile devs have been through this: added a new feature, submitted it to the app store and just after it is finally out there you realize that something is not working. For whatever reason.
If you are building a web-only product, solving this is usually fairly easy. You fix your bugs, deploy your code to your servers — done! …
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