Redfin Blog

'... "Does a price that ends in -000, like $490,000 seem casual? Is $499,999 too blue-light special?" I stared into my salad. Little did I know that Redfin's mad scientist, Mose Andre, was working on that very problem, crunching statistics on the data-set we pulled to calculate the Redfin Advantage. ...' [0] great article. what made it better was reading the blog [1] ~ hilarious. The first thing I read is company blog(s). You can tell a lot from the blog (SWOT) [2]. The company hierarchy, culture, toolset used, market. If a blog is boring, doesn't contain at least some sort of technical (even if it's just a hint), I mark that down as a 'old skool' software company who's roots are shipping executables or companies without leaders who understand 'transparency'. Reference [0] Redfin blog, 'Pricing Advice: Make the Last 3 Digits -500' http://blog.redfin.com/redfin/2007/03/pricing_advice_make_the_last_3.h… [1] Redfin, 'Redfin blog mentioned in article' http://blog.redfin.com [2] SWOT is an analysis tool and stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity & Threat

It's worth noting that sometimes you only have content that differs for your "logged in" users. Or, content that is the same with the exception of actions that a user has taken on your site. Say, in the case of a shopping cart. In that use case, you might find that one cache covers everything except their shopping cart preview. This is where ESI (Edge Side Includes) come in. I've never used it in practice, but the idea is similar to server side includes of yesteryear. Here's a good article: http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/esi_and_caching_trickery_in_var…

"Basically, they are printing money by being a middleman. Funny, i thought the internet was supposed to eliminate that kind of business." Have you MET the internet? It's one huge lead gen contraption (ads, groupon, kayak, google, the app store, itunes, etc). One of my all time favorite blog posts on the topic here: http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2007/08/the_web_is_becoming_a_gigantic_lea…

"I would absolutely love to know what it is about Rails that Twitter found stopped them from working on it together. Please, if you work there, I am dying to know." I don't work at Twitter, and I'm whitewashing a bit because I'm at work, but the consistent line I've heard from engineers there[1] and from the press[2] is performance. Plus, Scala has shares some linguistic niceties with Ruby that Java doesn't, so it's a little bit more of a natural fit. From my own experience with Scala, the reason to go in a service-oriented direction is, to say the least, make your compiles go faster over smaller isolated bits of functionality in your app. Scala type safety is awesome. Scala compiles, much less so. Ruby still runs at Twitter, but my understanding is that the more recent engineers there are afraid to touch what's there for fear of blowing things up. [1] http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/how_and_why_twitter_uses_scala.… [2] http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-on…

With JSONB here, JSONPath starts to become very interesting... http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/ http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2012/03/json_in_postgres.html That article was written before JSON/JSONB showed up, but the idea remains the same. I didn't have plv8 installed, so I did some plumbing code in plpython. plv8 would be more suitable though. https://github.com/jvinet/pg-jsonpath

> The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay I don't think that's true, at least not for Redfin. According to them: "Homes on the MLS show up on Redfin in 30 minutes or less." - http://forums.redfin.com/t5/Inland-Empire/How-quickly-does-MLS-info-ge… "Local brokerage sites like Redfin show homes for sale immediately, as opposed to the seven to nine day delay typical for the national portals." - http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/03/you-deserve-to-see-it-all.html#.U5… "Updates every 15-30 minutes" - http://www.redfin.com/about/data-quality-on-redfin The biggest advantage of a local (real human) broker is they know what's about to go up for sale, have detailed neighborhood info, can help grease the wheels of your deal, etc. If they're good.

If you want to see an example, check out Redfin: http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2013/10/redfin-introduces-new-instant-noti…

this makes Series F. never a letter you want to get to :) also interesting seeing the spin on Series E: http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2011/10/when_rabid_squirrels_attack.html

And building Twitter [1], and big-data next-generation databases [2], and android apps, and desktop apps, and big data [3], and as a platform for new languages (Clojure, Scala, Frege), and many more applications. Really, the JVM can be used for anything that _computers_ can be used for, and it does so in a way that the code is runnable across all major platforms and still maintains a top-5 language performance spot, even beating C/C++ in some specific cases. Why do you feel that the JVM is limited in its applications as a development platform? [1] http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/how_and_why_twitter_uses_scala.… [2] http://www.datomic.com/about.html [3] http://hadoop.apache.org/

It should be noted that this is for v2 of the API (which has been deprecated). For a more recent post about lots of markers on a v3 map, you might want to check out Redfin’s post on their solution, MultiMarker: http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/07/introducing_multimarker_the_fas…

Redfin also laid off around 20% of their staff a few days ago: http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/10/a_very_tough_day.html

The URL is broken. Try http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/02/the_next_silicon_valley.html

I think you may argue that some languages are in practice more or less pure by how much they encourage/enable avoiding mutability and side effects but of the 4/5 languages he discusses I'm pretty sure only haskell is purely functional. Scala Scheme and SML/ocaml are all impure functional that allow mutability/side effects. (Scala is considered an object functional hybrid by some and an object oriented language dressed as functional by others - try to avoid flamewar). Some Examples: I think Twitter uses Scala(see above) for a number of their back-end services (see http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/how_and_why_twitter_uses_scala.… Foursquare uses scala at least on the front end http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139062 . This page has a few other big success http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1658. Haskell has pandoc(http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) a cmdline tool to convert beetween markup formats(also a library with binding to several languages) I think it supports a wider range of formats/fidelity then alternatives. Ocaml: MLDonkey is an open source eDonkey2000 client Coq – a interactive theorem prover. Ocaml

We always know that Aaron will be in charge of all of Quicken’s online and desktop products in the original deal. Why the surprise? While I respect Aaron's decision, I think Jason just wants to point out we have lost the Scott Cook, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs of our generation because of this deal. 10 years later, will you still remember a general manager inside Intuit? Or will someone write a book about a general manager inside a corporation? We will forget about him very soon. In Jim Collins' words, leading entrepreneurs defined success on a very big scale. Their ambitions are huge. I don't think Aaron has done anything wrong. But as a young entrepreneur, we just lost someone who we can look up to. Also, Steve Jobs returned to Apple to be CEO but not a general manager of a department. Give you another point of view here. CEO of Redfin also agrees with what Jason Fried said. See the link below: http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2009/10/honey_i_shrunk_the_startups_part_i…