I'm Chris Clark, the CTO and co-founder of Grove Collaborative. Over the years I've written a number of articles about software, technology, and teams.

Postspage 2

11/19/2016

Photography & Journalism with Darcy Padilla & Julian Cox - Opening Remarks

On November 17th, I chaired an event at the de Young Museum related to the opening of the exhibit Danny Lyon: Message to the Future. It's there through April 30th, 2017 and I encourage anyone in San Francisco during its run to see it. Danny Lyon is a remarkable photographer …

 

08/12/2016

Actually Understanding Timezones in PostgreSQL

Timezones are the worst. We should all just live in UTC, reasonable sunset hours be damned. And learning about timezone implementation details is incredibly boring and esoteric¹, so most developers are not inclined to figure out what the hell is actually going on until they really need to. Like …

 

07/30/2016

Eight Surprises During My First Year as a Father

I have a 13-month-old son named Dashiell (pronounced Dash-uhl, and I'm sorry in advance to schoolage Dashiell, whose teachers will all say "Dah-sheel?" on his first day). He's awesome. I mean...I'm not super objective, but even so, he's definitely a good dude. We're going to keep him.

Most of …

 

07/12/2016

Zero Downtime Rebrand

Noah Smith and I gave this presentation at the San Francisco Django meetup in March of 2016, shortly after we rebranded ePantry to Grove Collaborative. Here's how we pulled it off.

Welcome folks!

That's us

We rebranded on March 8, 2016. Grove is an aspiration brand that speaks to our …

 

06/30/2016

The First Thing I Tell New Engineers

The first thing I tell junior programmers is: keep going.

If you've been programming a while, you know that feeling of encountering a new project, with a new stack, in a new language. The feeling is: OK. And you roll up your sleeves and get to work.

But do you …

 

06/29/2016

Software at Companies that Don't Sell Software

If you're a software professional, there are two types of companies you might work for; those whose products are fundamentally software (they make money directly from technology), and those that make their money some other way, but rely on software. Let's call the first Type A, and the second Type …

 

06/23/2016

Trello vs. Asana

In two totally different companies over the past 4 years, across different personalities, teams, and processes, I've seen Asana rejected no fewer than a dozen times in favor of Trello, in spite of multiple executive mandates to use Asana.

In both companies, management (of which I am a part) made …

 

06/17/2016

Pushing Bits with Python

When was the last time you needed to directly manipulate a bunch of binary data? Most engineers run across it only in the context of bit flags and masks in C++ or Java.

It's a little rarer to muck about with direct binary file data. It's nonetheless quite a bit …

 

06/09/2016

A Simple Content-Based Recommendation Engine in Python

Let's pretend we need to build a recommendation engine for an eCommerce web site.

There are basically two approaches you can take: content-based and collaborative-filtering. We'll look at some pros and cons of each approach, and then we'll dig into a simple implementation (ready for deployment on Heroku!) of a …

 

03/26/2015

How Celery Chord Synchronization Works

Celery is a powerful tool for managing asynchronous tasks in Python. The basic model is synchronous Python code pushes a task (in the form of a serialized message) into a message queue (the Celery "broker", which can be a variety of technologies - Redis, RabbitMQ, Memcached, or even a database), and …

 

04/21/2014

Refactoring for Testability: A Real World Example in Python/Django

At ePantry, we strive to have enough automated test coverage that we can deploy with confidence, without being dogmatic about our approach. We certainly aren't a TDD shop, and we don't have rules about code coverage metrics ("no commit can reduce code coverage!"), but it's very unusual that a non-cosmetic …

 

11/01/2013

The No-Frills Guide to PGP on OS X

Want to get started using PGP on your Mac, but confused by the morass of professor-doctor style sites with seemingly out-of-date software and plugins? Have no fear! I'll have you up and running in minutes with this handy guide. You'll learn how to use public key servers and how to …

 

09/12/2013

Form Over Function & The New iPhone

I probably found this more profound than it really is, but Matt Buchanan said it well in the New Yorker, regarding the latest iPhone announcements:

Fundamental technology, like manufacturing processes for processors and imaging sensors and displays, have evolved to the point that the basic shape and sense of a …

 

08/01/2013

Declarative Approach to Nesting Backbone Models

Backbone doesn't have great (any?) support for nested models. Here's my approach. I think it's kind of fun (we get to write recursive functions!), and hopefully useful. I'll report back when I've lived with it for a bit longer.

Here's the problem: We have a Backbone model with attributes that …

 

07/11/2013

How to Write a Bug Report

Writing good bug reports is the difference between actually seeing your bug get fixed and sending protracted emails over the course of a week convincing a developer that there is, in fact, a bug. By far the most important information you can provide in a bug report are clear reproduction …