Google analytics sucks. A lot.

One week we hated Google Analytics. Here’s why.

Like the majority of startups, most product decisions at carwow are based on data. Also like many startups we use google analytics. A month ago, however, we decided to try using Mixpanel. Why?

Images not loading on gmail using protocol-relative URLs

24 April 2015

We recently added https support to carwow. After some testing we decided to convert every url in the website to the protocol relative counterpart (e.g. any references to…

Javascript autocomplete on Vim for a Rails project

I worked for a couple of years in a C++ shop and got used to one of the best autocompletes available for vim, called ‘YouCompleteMe’. After a while I got used to the tool and I’m sure you can imagine how sad I was to transition to the less…

Heroku Postgres — Too many connections

Is your Postgres database on Heroku dying because of too many connections?

Do you see the following errors?

FATAL: remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections

Testing your site’s performance using ApacheBench

The other day we had a huge slowdown on some pages of our website, and when I investigated the cause I re-discovered a great tool for troubleshooting page-load speeds.

Postgres: Joining a parent table with its first child

24 April 2015

I end up using this a lot but not often enough to remember it. 
 I thought it might be useful to save it here instead of googling for it every single time.

Deleting duplicates in a postgres table

Occasionally we’ve forgotten to add a natural unique key to some of our tables. That combined with funky asynchronous javascript interfaces meant we ended up with duplicates in our database tables.