- May 10, 2018 natural-language-processing Automated Company Keyword Extraction Whether you’re a sales ops manager finding best-fit accounts or a VC investor ranking emerging companies in an industry, your process begins by narrowing down the complete universe of companies. Read more
- Apr 3, 2018 machine-learning Extracting Signals From the News At the core of DataFox is a focus on creating a pristine dataset of company information. We want this data to be as clean, accurate and all-encompassing as possible. Read more
- Feb 28, 2018 HTML Not so simple simple "see more" link I needed a ‘see more’ link and my usual go-tos wouldn’t work, so with some fancy CSS, I made my own. Read more
- Jan 2, 2018 emberjs Implementing Query Preloading on Ember 2.2 DataFox has been using Ember since the company’s beginnings over 4 years ago. When I joined about 6 months ago, we were on 1.13. With my help, our main user-facing application is on 2.2 now! We hope to get to LTS release and Ember CLI in the near ... Read more
- Dec 20, 2017 engineering-culture Engineering Book Club I really enjoy writing about our core values at DataFox and how we’ve made them an active part of our culture. Today, I want to talk about Constant Learning. Read more
- Nov 30, 2017 engineering-culture Shadowing Calls One of our core values at DataFox is empathy. We hire people who are driven to help others, and this defines our culture and our product. Read more
- Oct 7, 2017 code-style Names Matter There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. – Phil Karlton Read more
- Sep 24, 2017 engineering-culture The Empathy Hackathon One of our core values at DataFox is empathy. We are driven to understand our customers’ problems first-hand and solve them. But how do you inspire empathy in the people who build your tools when they are not the target customer of your product? Read more
- Aug 21, 2017 interviewing Engineering Interviewing Advice I Wish I Had Heard I recently had the chance to mentor a student at Hackbright, a dev bootcamp dedicated to helping women change careers into software engineering. As the session came to a close the focus turned to interviewing, so she asked me for advice. Read more
- Jul 18, 2017 javascript Decaffeinating a Large CoffeeScript Codebase Without Losing Sleep In 2013, DataFox chose CoffeeScript† over ECMAScript 5 because it improved developer productivity. It smoothed over many of the bad parts of JavaScript and provided syntax to make common patterns more idiomatic: class definitions, fat arrow functi... Read more
- May 29, 2017 nodejs NodeJS Best Practices: Error Handling in Express There are already many great articles about how to do error handling in NodeJS. They boil down to this: Read more
- Apr 30, 2017 engineering-culture Engineering Culture at DataFox DataFox has the best engineering culture I’ve ever worked in. I see it every time the team makes the tough decision to pass on a brilliant engineer with great technical skills because they would not make the team better. I see it in every detailed... Read more
- Mar 25, 2017 engineering-culture Make Your Systems Diligent, Not Your People, Part II: How To Build Diligent Systems Good engineering organizations admit their mistakes and learn from them so they don’t happen again. Great engineering organizations, however, improve without sacrificing agility. Read more
- Mar 25, 2017 engineering-culture Make Your Systems Diligent, Not Your People Something terrible has happened. Someone has made a big mistake and customers are very, very upset. Read more
- Mar 7, 2017 emberjs Polymorphism in Ember Data One of the core powers of DataFox is our ability to show you a customized feed of recent events affecting companies you care about. For example, today I can see that my former employer, Box, launched a new product, while my friend’s company, FireE... Read more
- Feb 22, 2017 mongoose What We Wish We Had Known About Mongoose At DataFox we use mongoose as an ORM layer that abstracts our MongoDB calls. Overall, we recommend using it because it improves code clarity and effectively adds schemas to MongoDB without the overhead of table migrations. However, we’ve learned a... Read more
- Feb 7, 2017 engineering This is What Learning Feels Like Today, I asked our newest hire how she was doing, and she admitted she was nervous about being on-call for the first time. “I’m not sure I’ll know what to do,” she added. Read more
- Jan 26, 2017 Planning Quarterly Planning Balancing the need to be responsive to immediate customer feedback with the need for longer-term strategic product development is hard. While we’re still iterating on this process, we wanted to share how we approach quarterly planning. Our goal is... Read more
- Jan 8, 2017 css Clean CSS CSS is like the dentist for many engineers, an unpleasant experience you can’t avoid. They believe that CSS inevitably devolves into a mess of spaghetti as the codebase grows. Read more
- Apr 17, 2015 general Keyword-Based Company Similarity Finding Similar Companies Read more
- Mar 27, 2015 customerfeedback Our Customer Feedback Meeting Startups love to talk about being “customer focused” and “delighting users”, but too often this talk has little to do with what engineers do in their day-to-day work. Read more
- Oct 5, 2014 mongodb Protect Your Database with .mongorc Your database is the most import piece of your infrastructure and also your most vulnerable. When it’s down, everything is down. Anything you can do to protect against errors or mistakes is worth the effort. Read more
- Sep 28, 2014 nodejs NodeJs Best Practices: Environment-Specific Configuration When you find yourself writing code like: Read more
- Sep 1, 2014 nodejs 10 Great JavaScript Utils You Should Stop Reinventing I’ve wasted more time than I care to admit reinventing these wheels. These utilities are all small and well documented. Just use them. Read more
- Aug 23, 2014 coffeescript Edit CoffeeScript like a Pro in 6 Minutes Pictured Above: See errors and inconsistencies in your code as you type. Read more
- Aug 2, 2014 nodejs NodeJs Best Practices: Event Emitting and Async Callbacks The Issue Read more
- Jun 8, 2014 nodejs NodeJS Best Practices: Callbacks As an experienced programmer, I’ve found that NodeJS is easy to learn with many tutorials to cover the basics. However, I was (and still am) unclear about what are the best practices for NodeJS. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned so far abo... Read more