Category : Events

in Events, Tech
Hackathon logo winter 2012

Spring Hackathon 2012

Hackathon is held twice a year at Tagged, with this year’s Spring Hackathon falling on March 14 (Pi Day!).

This Hackathon brought a lot of interesting projects to the table, which engaged a wide range of technologies. Though Hackathons are typically engineer-focused, we had lots of members from Customer Experience, Recruiting and Accounting join in too.

The pitching begins.

At 6 p.m., everyone gathered for “the pitch.” Each pitcher got some stage time to convince people why they should join his/her group and build excitement for the idea. It was great to see how the groups formed, with people from different departments joining forces to create teams big and small. After the pitches, dinner was served, and the groups began collaboration – Hackathon was in full swing!

We quickly formed a ‘Hackathon 2012′ HipChat room and were able to exchange information and ideas. (On a day-to-day basis, HipChat also offers a way to ask questions, make jokes and coordinate code pushes with the larger team.)

We were off to a great start, and right away people were able to knock out some quick-turnaround projects. One team quickly made huge time-saving improvements to our internal customer management tool before continuing on with other projects.

3 a.m.: Gordo remains enthusiastic, while Max struggles to stay awake.

One great thing about Hackathon is that people get a chance to make tweaks to tools that might not be top priority at other times. This is the spirit of the Hackathon – getting a chance to work on whatever you want. The power lies with the participants. This can be learning a new technology, building a cutting edge tool, or somehow getting convinced to work on things you never thought you would touch.

Late night snack.

At 6 a.m. the following morning, Winter Hackathon came to a close, with the true hackers staying ‘til the end and receiving official Hackathon t-shirts at breakfast.

Teams were then given one to two weeks to put the finishing touches on their projects and get ready for demo day. (Finishing touches include minor tweaks to make the project complete, not major project additions.)

For the demo, we invited the whole company to watch presentations on 15 of the amazing projects (more projects were worked on, but presenting is optional).

Here we are announcing the winners.

Once the demo was over, people got to vote on their favorite projects. And what would a Hackathon be without cool prizes? This year winners were awarded Kindles, Beats by Dre or an ipod.

And now for the winners!

The project that received the Technological Achievement award utilized another work-in-progress tool: Stig. Stig is a new, non-relational, distributed-graph database. The winning team of Viktor Stanchev, Gregory Cole, Lucas Thoresen and Daniel Hood completed a project consisting of a node.js module connecting to Stig to simulate Tagged’s Newsfeed feature.

Lucas, Dan, and Greg with their prizes!

For the Overall Awesomeness award, one of our interns from the University of Waterloo, Kartik Talwar, made an XMPP based chat bot called ‘Ned,’ which gives out various information such as code review diffs, bug information, the weather, the Tagged lunch and dinner menus, and other interesting information. This bot provides much needed efficiencies and is currently in use here at Tagged.

Kartik wins an iPod!

The award for the Best Product Innovation went to a team calling themselves ‘Big Cash Money,’ consisting of Hai Tran, Chris Stelma and Erik Johannessen. This team updated the ‘Buy Gold’ screen seen on Tagged to have several different options that would be AB tested to see how this would affect purchases.

Team "Big Cash Money" with their new Kindles!

Hackathon projects are sometimes released to production, which is a great feeling for those who can see their project added to Tagged and pushed to millions of users. At Tagged, we make extensive use of AB testing, and there were a few projects this year that got approved, tested and released with this process.  If we see decent analytic metrics for features, only then can it be applied to 100 percent of users.

Tagged’s Spring Hackathon was a success. We saw more people participate than ever before, yielding some awesome products that capitalized on previous frameworks developed at Tagged. We can’t wait for our summer event!

More fun photos on Flickr.

Brandon Mangold and Barrett Cook are Tagged’s Hackathon Chairmen.

in Events, Security

Security for Real Life

RSA Conference

Today with many of my colleagues, I’m off to RSA Conference, a five-day event focused around information security. While getting ready for the conference, I spent a little time reflecting on my personal security practices and lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Once upon a time I played a very fun game called how many email addresses can I have? That soon expanded into how many online merchants will I shop with, how many blogs will I update and how many game and news sites will I participate in?

Around this time I cleverly decided that my master passwords for “work stuff,” “school stuff” and “personal stuff” should all be different — just in case. I’ve always been paranoid, so all of the passwords were eight-plus characters with numbers, a healthy mix of upper and lowercase letters, and some special characters thrown in. Of course, not all sites allowed long strings or special characters, so I had a few shorter passwords available for sites that limited password flexibility.

By the time online banking and e-pay options took off, I had a whole new crop of passwords to remember. Financial passwords, health-related benefits passwords, government passwords – the game was a little higher stakes and so of course each of those sites needed their own passwords.

This inspired a mental model redesign: in addition to having different passwords for “work,” “school” and “personal,” I started stratifying by risk level. I had throw-away passwords for sites that I rarely use and don’t have much info on me that needs protecting, all the way up to unique, highly complex passwords for sites that, if my account was compromised, could have an impact on my privacy or productivity. These “families” of passwords worked for the most part, though I have to admit the buffer in my brain for passwords was starting to overflow.

The train went off the rails when sites that used email address as usernames started getting compromised en masse. Now, my entire families of passwords needed to be replaced. As a result, I’ve given in — I can’t remember them all! Instead, I’ve gotten software that will securely store all my passwords in one place, regularly backed up to multiple locations (and in encrypted form, naturally). I have it setup to be available on all my regularly used devices and the software will create passwords for me too. These are randomly generated strings with as much complexity as I like!

I’ve also opted into SMS or mobile device-based authentication where possible, so that if someone hijacks a session or brute forces my password, I have an added level of security. SMS-based authentication for users was recently introduced at Tagged and I’m excited that so many users have opted into stronger security.

As an industry, we used to assume that more security meant more inconvenience, but simplifying strong authentication has definitely made my life more convenient! So no more password families and no more password construction “rules.” Just easy, secure authentication wherever I go online.

I use 1Password and I’ve heard good things about several password management options available on the market. Lifehacker gives a nice roundup of its top five.

Allison Miller is the Director of Security and Risk Management at Tagged.

in Community, Events, Scalability
Dave Mangot Graphite Talk copy3

Site Monitoring At Tagged With Graphite

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to give a talk on one of my favorite visualization tools, Graphite, at the Bay Area Large Scale Production Engineering Meetup. Recently, we’ve been trying out the Graphite Realtime Graphing system at Tagged. It started as an experiment during our latest Hackathon, and the more we’ve tried it, the more things there are to like.

For those interested, I’ve attached the presentation below and video of my talk is available  here:

LSPE Meetup talk on Graphite

View more presentations from dmangot

Dave Mangot is a Senior Systems Administrator at Tagged and you can follow him on his blog.