The Pixel

Snowflake Kafka What?

The best infrastructure makes the least amount of noise

Here at Pixability, we deal with lots of data every day. In our 11+ year quest to help brands and advertisers succeed on YouTube, one of…

I read and watch a lot of science fiction, both contemporary and classic — and one of my favorites is Frank Herbert’s Dune. I even have a…

I’m a big fan of the simple truths stated in Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and firmly believe that…

At Pixability, we primarily leverage Ansible for provisioning infrastructure — but recently, we started to explore Terraform as well. Both…

Last month, I had a Star Trek moment. While riding the Downeaster north to Portland, Maine, I alternated between coding and communicating…

Every big data company has to grapple with a complex issue: how to deliver data to users in a way that’s intuitive to use, easily…

Four years ago, I joined Pixability as an intern on our Customer Success team. Back then, you could count the entire company on two hands…

The moment I accepted Pixability’s summer engineering intern position, I knew my programming training wheels were coming off. Over the…

At Pixability we always look for areas to improve and systematize our development processes. Often changes are motivated by a particular…

At Pixability, our QA team is made up of a director, two manual testers, and two automation engineers. Our Engineering department operates…

In this series, we share our thoughts on how we select engineering and development processes at Pixability. While this post is…

What’s a higher priority: this bug that impacts a handful of customers or this user story that’s vital to our company goals?

Like many data scientists, I work in a field that did not formally exist when I finished university. The novelty of the field — and its…

Over the last 20 years I fought a fierce battle against RDBM schema constraints and enhancements of all kinds. We are talking about things…

When you first start building an app, you often start with simple views. But in the real world of enterprise apps, nothing ever stays…

In this short blog series, we examine how software development teams evolve and grow in size, from one engineer to close to 25. As…

Last May, I was scrambling to find an internship after my first year at Brown. I had two weeks left in the semester before heading back…

For the past five years most of my software development experience has been with the Ruby on Rails framework, but recently I made the…

Even if you don’t grow up watching sci-fi or major in computer science, it is still possible to grow up and write production code. I…

Every successful tech company reaches the important milestone of having multiple software projects. After proving the success of the first…

You know Java and you’re thinking about adding Python to your bag of tricks. CS stalwarts, like Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++…

Microservices have been shaking up the world of server-side software development as well as DevOps in recent years. Docker is making it…