In order to support SSL for a simple Tornado server on EC2, a certificate is required. This process seems harder than it should be, so I thought I’d share the process that recently worked for me.

There are several tradeoffs to consider:

• Certificate Authority (CA) Reputation (‘Self Sign’ – VeriSign)
• Price (Free – $3000/year)
• Domain Coverage: (Single, Multi, Wildcard)

After considering these options and reading about other people’s experiences, I concluded that GoDaddy is the least expensive, reasonably well respected CA. At GoDaddy the wildcard option is 15 times as expensive as the standard single domain certificate (with discount), so it’s a better deal to buy single domain certs even if you need a few.

Steps I took:

1. Search Google for GoDaddy SSL deal.
2. Login to GoDaddy and buy a single domain certificate for $12.99/year.
3. Go to ‘My Account’, click SSL Certificates. Activate your purchased token. Wait a few minutes.
4. Configure your cert. Choose “Third party server”. Provide a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for your domain (see below).
5. Download the cert. Use the cert along with your .key file from the CSR generation process to setup SSL on your server(s).

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As part of Pulse’s recent announcement of crossing the 11M user mark (up 10x since last year!), we’ve written a set of blog posts to share how we’ve scaled our backend infrastructure to keep up with our new users and support some powerful new features. Here’s a quick recap of our systems on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google App Engine (GAE), along with links to the detailed posts describing each.

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Earlier this week I wrote a guest post for the Google App Engine Blog on how Pulse has scaled-up our backend infrastructure to prepare for the recent Kindle Fire launch.

The Kindle Fire includes Pulse as one of the only preloaded apps and is projected to sell over five million units this quarter alone. This meant we had to prepare for nearly doubling our user-base in a very short period. We also needed to be ready for spikes in load due to press events and the holiday season.

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Livecount is an implementation of real-time counters that leverages the performance of memcache and task queues on Google AppEngine.

Building a solid analytics platform is often a combination of real-time and batch processing. Batch processing, with a tool like Hadoop, is great for digging into large amounts of past data and asking questions that cannot be anticipated.  In contrast, when it is known ahead of time that certain aggregates will be required, the best solution is usually to count each event as it happens. Livecount makes it easier to address this second use-case.

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Warning

Before I start, let me recommend that you don’t try this. The potential savings you gain from using pre-tax Commuter Check cards likely won’t be worth the pain of actually trying to buy something with them. Return the cards to your employer and ask them to enroll in another option for funding your commute costs pre-tax!

Update: The Autoload program via Clipper works great. Instead of buying a pass in person with a commuter check card, you tag on/off once at the beginning of the month to load a new pass.

Goal

Use two Commuter Check cards issued by an employer (each containing $100) to purchase a zone 1-3 monthly Caltrain pass on a Clipper card (for $179).
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I’m very excited to share that Pulse has announced it’s series A funding round! All of us are still fired up about last week’s Apple Design Award at WWDC and our recent 4 million user milestone, not to mention that today is our co-founder Ankit’s birthday. Thanks to the team for their tireless work and to everyone who has helped us get here!

Check out some of today’s press:

Pulse Blog – Announcing Our Series A Financing
TechCrunch – 4 Million Users Strong And Apple Design Award In Hand, Pulse Grabs $9 Million Series A
WSJ – Pulse Taps $9M To Win Battle For Mobile-News Consumers
Forbes – News Reader Pulse Raises $9 Million
Mashable – Pulse Passes 4 Million Users, Raises $9 Million for Visual News Reader

Working for a startup usually means putting in more hours than others. Recently, I spent two days on less than 3 hours of sleep in order to push out our new Pulse.me release. This doesn’t seem strange to me and didn’t make me unhappy. In fact, it was one of the most exciting and fun things I’ve done in a while. However, after mentioning it to some friends, I realized not everyone understands why it can be good to spend so much time “working” to build something you believe in.

Upon hearing about my sleep deprived state, my friend sent me a link to the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed along with the comment “you might need this.”  I appreciated the link and enjoyed the reminder to live life to the fullest, especially with regards to keeping in touch with friends and loved ones. I also realized that my friend didn’t understand that for me the long hours I put in are all about fulfilling my dreams of creating new technology and impacting the world in a positive way. According the article, not chasing after dreams is people’s #1 regret.

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In addition to the regular Pulse Blog where we regularly share updates about our latest features and new content, Pulse now has an Engineering Blog!  The goal is to share some of the exciting engineering work that goes into bringing users the Pulse experience they’ve come to expect. To kick things off I added a post about Using Data Analysis to Discover Top Stories.  In the post I share a bit about how we use AWS to collect and analyse our data, along with how we serve up the feeds we build via AppEngine.  Check it out!

If you use multiple git repositories, it’s only a matter of time until you’ll want to refactor some files from one project to another.  Today at Pulse we reached the point where it was time to split up a very large repository that was starting to be used for too many different sub-projects.

After reading some suggested approaches, I spent more time than I would have liked fighting with Git to actually make it happen. In the hopes of helping someone else avoid the same trouble, here’s the solution that ended up working best. The solution is primarily based on ebneter’s excellent question on Stack Overflow.

Another solution is Linus Torvald’s “The coolest merge, EVER!“ Unfortunately, his approach seems to require more manual fiddling than I would like and results in a repository with two roots. I don’t completely understand the implications of this, so I opted for something more like a standard merge.

Goal:

• Move directory 1 from Git repository A to Git repository B.

Constraints:

• Git repository A contains other directories that we don’t want to move.
• We’d like to perserve the Git commit history for the directory we are moving.

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A few months ago I mentioned that I left the government/research world (Sandia Labs) and joined an exciting new startup.   I’d like to share a bit more about my experience so far and announce that we are hiring!

Those who have worked at a large company and then moved to startup can probably relate to my experience.  First, without a doubt, the most motivating and fun part about working at Pulse is seeing the impact of my work. And I don’t mean just having someone say “Good Job” or receiving a strong performance review, I mean seeing thousands of people USE the results of your work and submit feedback about how it benefitted their lives.  At Pulse, this experience is magnified by the fact that we release new product features every two weeks, and not ever quarter, or every year!

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