Posts
Adam DrakeIntro I do a lot of work with growth-stage startups, and many of them use Redis for all sorts of things. Sometimes as a key/value store for caching, sometimes as a message queue, sometimes as a pub/sub message broker, etc. Redis is a great tool, with great performance, when used properly. However, I’ve often seen cases where it is not used with good performance in mind, often to the detriment of system uptime and customer satisfaction.
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read more Adam DrakeIntro I’ve been busy as usual for the last couple of months, and haven’t really had time to extend the Project Euler series after Problem 1 and Problem 2 articles.
However, I finally did set aside some time to play around with Problem 3: finding the largest prime factor of a number.
Problem Statement The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29.
What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143?
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read more Adam DrakeI spend a lot of time working with growth-stage startups. I often see similar problems across companies when it comes to scaling up their tech teams. At a certain point, the intuitive way to grow a team breaks down, and a reorganization (“reorg”) is necessary in order to adopt a scalable structure. Where some companies may take months to design and execute a reorg, I prefer to handle the majority of it in about ten minutes.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction When I advise organizations, they often ask if I have written down or somehow codified my perspectives on leadership and operations. Until now, the answer has been a polite not yet. I simply didn’t believe I have accumulated sufficient experience to warrant writing something from a position of authority on the topic of leadership and operations in organizations. After much consideration and gentle prodding from advisory clients, I have come to understand that my perspective may be flawed.
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read more Adam DrakeI’m not here to be right, I’m here to win. That’s a phrase I often keep in mind, especially when I feel my own ego getting the best of me or when I see someone else’s ego affecting their judgment. In this context, win means making progress towards a larger strategic goal, likely by achieving some intermediate objective. So if you are playing to win and not just to be right then you are putting aside your own ego and emotional involvement in order to make progress towards a larger goal.
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