Official StumbleUpon Blog

Ask A Developer #1: Eric Goldberg

Monday, September 08, 2008

Eric Goldberg leads the Web Applications team at StumbleUpon. Originally from outside Flint, Michigan, Eric studied computer engineering and Japanese history at the University of Michigan and relocated to San Francisco in 2005.

Eric started working for StumbleUpon in late 2006 as project lead on StumbleVideo. When not programming or Stumbling, he enjoys San Francisco nightlife, traveling, the great outdoors, bicycling and cats. 

Q: A few months back I read in a discussion thread where SU was using something called a "sandbox." The person commenting was one who performs developmental work for SU. I believe his comment was in reference to thwarting the actions of spammers, but I am not sure. What is a "sandbox?" Exactly how is it used by SU?

A: In general terms, a sandbox is just an area of an application, website, or network where developers can test out new features or bug fixes without affecting the rest of the site. Developers at StumbleUpon use a copy of the production database to test against, so that we're sure that software we write has a diverse ecosystem of data to process. This makes it more likely that we will see problems or edge cases that we didn't previously envision.

It also helps the QA department test a variety of use cases that developers might not think of. For instance, our quality assurance engineer has many accounts, with various privacy settings, adult filters, ages, genders, locations, topics, etc. A well setup sandbox will allow him to interact with the site without modifying live data, and without having to work with a simplistic or reduced set of data.

I am not aware of a specific sandbox for anti-spam technologies, per se, but there continues to be exciting work done in the areas of anti-spam in various sandboxed development and testing environments at SU.

Q: How many times a week an average developer see the founding fathers?

A: It varies per developer and per team, but the founders are available and accessible to everyone in StumbleUpon. Geoff and Garrett work out of the San Francisco office; their desks are mingled amongst the engineering team. Justin works remotely in Canada.

Personally, I work the most with GMC because we work closely on web appllcation brainstorming, design, execution details, etc. Geoff and I work together a fair amount on security, anti-spam, and lately, a cool project we'll be unveiling in September. Justin works out of the Canada office, and is more involved with the business side of operations, so I don't interact with him very often - though he's a great conversationalist and very kind.

Q: What's the proportion of time spent fixing bugs, implementing new things, and doing research/trying experimental things?

A: Again, this varies per engineer and per week. I prefer to work on experimental and new features, especially projects that have the potential to earn me kudos from fellow Stumblers. However, there are always bugs in a network that seeks to do so much with so many kinds of data, so there's always a fire to fight.

I try to spend three days per week on a large project, one day per week helping other teams with requests, and one day fixing bugs and writing little enhancements that I've always wanted. For instance, check out the website review pages. You now can click on the "X hours ago" text for each review, and see the entry on the reviewer's blog. I just thought it would be cool to be able to get to the blog entry from a review, so added it in the other day when I had a few minutes.

Q: Why does StumbleUpon search find only tagged pages?

A: Until recently, we just haven't given searching StumbleUpon as much priority as the stumbling experience. However, the more reviews, tags, blog posts, and website we have, the more the need to be able to search through it all. We now have a project to pair several open-source search technologies with internal custom search technologies to create a much better searching experience for us all. This true indexed search feature should roll some time soon.

Q: Dear mystery-dev, why does the What's New page shows only thumb-up reviews?

A: Good question. There are a lot more things we can present here. I guess we haven't really revisited the What's New tab since we don't hear many complaints about it or feature suggestions.

I agree that it would be cool to see other information on this tab. What would you want to see?

Thanks for reading. If you'd like to ask a question of a StumbleUpon developer, post it here: http://stumbleupon.group.stumbleupon.com/forum/98943/. We'll select five questions to answer in our next edition.