Chartbeat

Whoa! I know what you’re thinking. You want more of those crazy-interesting Chartteam spotlights and this second round is long overdue. Don’t fret, don’t fret — we’re about to get up, close, and personal with Shaun, a Frontend Engineer extraordinaire, who joined us early this year. As far as I can tell, he’s happy here – though he does frequently complain to me about how the insane amount of cake and desserts is affecting the fit of his pants, but that’s one of the better problems to have in my opinion.

You may have noticed that Shaun’s been all over our blog recently, sharing some of the work he’s been up to. I sat down with him a few days ago to chat about his experience at Chartbeat so far and what keeps him excited about what we’re building here.

What he brings to the table:

Shaun didn’t necessarily go to college with his mind set on frontend engineering – he actually went to school for Electrical Engineering. Before coming to Chartbeat, Shaun owned a paintball company, travelling the world playing in awesome leagues like PSP and AXBL. Yes, I said paintball company. Most recently, though, he spent some time at Crestron Electronics as the head of UI for their software group and as a Lead Frontend Developer for Lot 18.

So what cool things are you working on now?

My main focus this cycle includes tying up loose ends on the Video Dashboard as well as building the Ooyala Flash and HTML5 video plugins. However, I’m most passionate about the work I’m doing around measuring content quality – or at least trying to. I’m working on my Shaun Appreciation Score ( it’s not a narcissistic naming choice by any means), which is my attempt to measure how much time users are spending inside actual content – the stories themselves – and not just on the page. If you’re curious, check out my most recent post. 

What challenges are you facing as we continue to grow?

In the short term, I’m looking at creating a pinger that is optimized for size since serving billions of requests off of our CDN can get real pricey. What’s even more interesting is that the pinger needs to work with lots of different use cases like Brightcove, Flash, etc.

 If we’re talking about long-term challenges, that’s harder to say because we’re working on so many cool things right now and only time will tell, really. I suppose I’m most focused on creating fast, responsive UI’s that are user intuitive and fun to use.

What have you learned working here?

One of the greatest things about working at Chartbeat is how much you’re encouraged to continue learning. At Chartbeat, I work with some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with,  so I’ve been pushing myself to new limits lately. Specifically, I’ve learnt a lot more about Python over the last few months and also doing frontend work that’s optimized for scale (because we’re growing!).

What’s the weirdest Chartbeat moment you’ve had so far?

Our CEO Tony and his wife Maya get to know new hires by cooking dinner for them. The first thing I noticed when I arrived at their place was their massive book collection and more importantly, this enormous number of romance novels on the shelves. Two minutes later, everything clicked and I realized that Maya is a romance novelist by trade and I no longer felt the need to judge Tony’s less-than-manly reading preferences. ;) 

What do you think one of the best Chartbeat perks are?

A culture that supports dogs in the office isn’t an uncommon perk for most startups out there, but Chartbeat is awesome about pups at work. I may be a little biased around this perk because I think my dog, Ranger, is the best, but the Chartpups really make our office fun, relaxed and happy.

I love it so much that every Wednesday I try to wear my “Champ” tee since Champ is in the office most weeks on that day. It’s amazing how something so simple makes long days at work far more enjoyable for everyone.

Clearly, we have some amazingly challenging problems that come up every day that only the brightest – and quirkiest – minds out there can solve.

If you’re a data-loving nerd at heart and curious about why frontend development at Chartbeat is awesome, get in touch with Shaun directly or check out one of our openings. We’d love to meet you.

In my line of work, I could talk about culture and hiring until I’m blue in the face, but that’s pretty much only entertaining for me, less you. I mean, yes, we have an amazing culture and the smartest people I’ve ever worked with but that doesn’t give you an idea of what it’s really like to eat (snacks!), live (beanbag nap chairs!), and breathe (fresh Union Square air!) Chartbeat.

So we’re taking it back to Kindergarten with some show and tell right from the source, our favorite Chartteam members.

First up, is the inside scoop from Wes, one of our crazy-experienced Backend Engineers who joined Chartbeat last year to help us tackle the sheer scale of data challenges we face every day.

What he brings to the table:
Wes spent eight years building technical infrastructure for high frequency trading, before falling in love with us. And before that, he spent five as a founder and Director of Technology of Athena Capital Research. As is often the case, he grew weary of the finance world over time and decided to join the startup community by forming S7 Labs, which specialized in developing tech for startups. At S7, they built Songza Radio and Storybox, a notable Seedcamp NY 2012 finalist.

So what cool things are you working on now?
We’re obviously working most often in the real-time space and on an average day, we’re dealing with an incredible amount of data — peaking at around 130,000 requests per SECOND (which is crazy!) The challenge that comes up is storing and processing it over long historical periods at a very granular scale.

I’m working on projects that will help that. Soon we’ll be rolling out features that provide Chartbeat-style action-centric context to those real-time decisions with additional weeks or months of data. So, we now need to have systems for efficiently writing and reading a decent chunk of traffic for offline analysis, and I’ll be making that happen.

What challenges are you facing as we continue to grow?
My job will only become harder in a good way as we take on more and more international clients (hello, China!), and as our clients grow their audiences with more and more visitors to their sites and apps. We’d like to push the limits of what’s technically possible. Chartbeat did groundbreaking work to provide real-time analytics at scale; now we’re lucky enough to see that it’s virtually a given that publishers have to have Chartbeat. We’re applying that kind of boldness to all of our systems, and aim to build the most insightful, intuitive product out there.

What have you learned working here?
It’s rare that a job demands such a breadth of knowledge. I like to say that funny things happen at scale; you need to be aware of everything that’s happening from the context switches your OS is doing to big abstractions like work queues and databases.

Chartbeat also has a very open culture and a rigorous peer review system, which results in high standards and low defect rates. Sure we break things — everybody does — but we don’t take that as a tradeoff for moving fast.

What’s the weirdest Chartbeat moment you’ve had so far?
Getting introduced to the Chartbeat Ornithology chatroom is by far one of the oddest/most interesting things I’ve experienced so far. It sounds weird but, really, it’s a place where we talk about… well, we talk about birds. Naturally the conversations flow around everything from the Black Oystercatcher to the African Crowned Eagle – both notable winners of the famed “Bird of the Day” contest. Naturally.

If you could stump a new hire with an out-of-this world question at our weekly Pulse Check company meeting, what would you ask?
So I’ll literally take this question “out-of-this-world”. Tony butchered this question at our last meeting, but I would ask: Suppose you were selected for the first mission to Mars ever. There’s a catch (of course) which is that you can’t have any contact with civilization for N number of years. What is the largest N you’d tolerate to be the first person to Mars?

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Clearly, we have some awesome real-world problems that come up every day that only the brightest (although slightly quirky) minds out there can solve. If you’re a data-loving nerd at heart and curious about why backend development at Chartbeat is interesting and challenging, get in touch with Wes directly or apply to one of our openings. We’d love to meet you.