Interlude
I’ve been meaning to write another blog post for a while now, but life has conspired against me in some of the most exciting and brutal ways possible.
About a month after I posted the last link on Angular 2.0, I gave notice to my former employer. In January, I started at Faraday, a data-driven marketing startup that uses machine learning to help companies locate and contact likely customers. It’s a really exciting place to work; smart people, cool technology, moving fast and a lot of autonomy. Somewhere, I have a draft looking back at the four years I worked for Dealer, and the months I’ve worked for Faraday; it never got published, and probably doesn’t apply anymore.
On Feburary 2nd, my stepfather died suddenly of a heart attack. He was never a father figure to me, but he was a good friend and, in many ways, the kind of person I aspire to be. His death was devastating, to me and my mother. Much of my free time in the last few months has been helping my mother through this crisis.
In the middle of February, my grandfather–my mother’s father–died. He was nearly 100, and his death was somewhat anticipated. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to work through many deaths in the family so close together.
In the beginning of May, the whole Faraday team got together for a week and to get our product ready for a public launch. Hundreds of person-hours were spent that week finishing all the bits that had been put off for months; we polished the parts of the app that weren’t working well, we redesigned the login and signup flow, relaunched the website, built an automated tour of the app, rebuilt parts of our campaign-construction process, and rethought all the indexes in our giant geospatial database.
On May 11, we soft-launched our webapp. Anyone can sign up for an account and explore a nation of demographic data. I encourage you to do so at app.faraday.io/signup.
In a couple days, I hope to finish a technical blog post about using Figwheel with Docker.