Yellowbrick - Neil Carson

Inhibitions of an Entrepreneur and Best Kept Secrets

Andrew Feldman hit me on the head after the meeting: “You’ve got great people but there's no leadership in this company. If you don’t solve this, your company will be dead.” Slap in the face, I woke up.

AWS

How Kubernetes halved our cloud spend, saved $3.9M/yr

We were burning about $6M/yr across AWS, Azure and GCP. We immediately cut this spend in half by repatriating workloads into a new Kubernetes-based private cloud, then saved even more as the private cloud grew.

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse for data apps

Data applications' needs are different from traditional enterprise data warehouses.

Data Warehouse

Being outcompeted by suppliers

It's long-term trouble to be running a business where your competitors control the cost of your product. This didn't end well at my previous employer, and won't end well at some cloud data warehouse companies either.

Yellowbrick

A start-up with global gumption

The first code of Yellowbrick was written in Hong Kong, the USA, the UK and Estonia.

Business

Why I love a good crisis

I've recently been doing some soul searching about some of the things I like and dislike the most about my job. In addition to the usual stuff — happy employees, ecstatic customers, winning deals, increasing valuations, congratulatory board meetings, funding rounds and all the usual — there's a

Yellowbrick

Opinionated musings on data lakes, lake houses, warehouses, SQL Engines

SQL engines aren't data warehouses. SQL tech is a fashion. In-memory analytics makes no sense. Data lakehouses aren't data warehouses. Neither was Hadoop.

Yellowbrick

Learning from my hiring mistakes

I've made more than my fair share of hiring mistakes in some areas, and this post tries to dissect why.

Yellowbrick

Improving S3 performance from C++

How do we maximise S3 random IOPS throughput at different block sizes and queue depths?

Yellowbrick

Why success doesn't feel good

As we try to climb the mountain that goes up and to the right, we sometimes hit potholes in the road. Combined with social media's continual assertion that everyone else is doing better, this makes us feel unnecessarily bad.

Yellowbrick

Rid us of dull corporate apparel!

Branded clothing is a really big thing in technology companies in general. Silicon Valley startups are perpetually giving out "swag" to customers, ranging from all sorts of utility items such as keychains, pens, mugs and coolers, stickers to put on our laptops, and – most importantly – clothing. Clothes have