Tag: hottakes
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Multi-tenant SAML in an afternoon (using SSOReady)
tldr; I took SSOReady up on their marketing tagline of “SAML in an afternoon”. Overall, it was a positive experience and despite not quite having a production-ready deployment in an afternoon, I think their tagline is a fair approximation of effort. Introduction Enterprise SSO logins are a weird dictomony. Implementing something like OIDC or SAML…
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Protecting ECS Tasks From Scale-In
As part of the Masset digital asset management platform, we sometimes need to run tasks that take a long time. For example, when someone uploads a video, we may need to resize it to a few different sizes or extract the audio from it. Originally we used AWS Lamdba for this because it allowed dynamic…
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Resolving downtime during rolling Single Page Application deployments
This is the first post in a two-part series on how Masset identified and removed downtime when deploying it’s React-based Single Page Application (SPA) frontend. TLDR: Container-based static sites suffer from downtime when using rolling deployments. We can use a CDN (Cloudfront in this case) to mitigate the issue and get some fringe benefits in…
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Week 10: Don’t buy into the unfounded spam
The age-old adage states that if you win the lottery, keep it a secret. Once it’s public knowledge, the vultures start circling. Unfortunately, after raising a round of funding, you don’t keep it secret. In fact, it often benefits you to shout it from the rooftops. I expected an increase in inbound spam once we…
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Week 9: Masset’s Boring Technology
I missed blogging for a few weeks over the holiday season (ie sickness season), but we’re finally back in good health and in the full swing of things again. Coming back, I thought it’d be fun to document Masset’s early tech stack. It’s bound to evolve over time, so tracking that evolution will be fun.…
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Thoughts on Pre-Seed Funding after closing Masset’s first round
Masset recently closed a round of Pre-Seed funding for 700k! You can read all about it on techbuzz.news who graciously picked up the story. I won’t lie, given the current economic situation, raising anything feels like a great success. I’m extremely grateful to our investors have taken a chance on us. And believed in us…
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Week 4: You Need a Support System
At 5:30 PM on my last day of W2 employment, I wrapped up a final few emails, said a couple last goodbyes and closed my laptop. Then, I sat and stared at two blank monitors for a few moments. “What am I doing?” I thought. “I can’t start a company. Most startups fail. The numbers…
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Augmenting Sentry tracing in Spring Boot and MyBatis
Problem: The default Sentry configuration for Spring Boot does not provide enough granularity to trace performance problems. Developers can augment code paths by specifically auditing them, but that feels too manual. Initial Setup Sentry is a great visibility tool for startups. Having used other options at larger companies, we choose Sentry at Masset for its…
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Week 2: Internal Analytics
This week was invested in expanding our internal analytics capabilities. In order to deliver on our core values, Masset needs to be able to help customers identify how content is being consumed both 1) within the company and 2) externally by customers and prospects. We’ve got lots of big plans for how we can accomplish…