Author Archives: skastel

I hate my TODO list

Posted on February 2, 2012 by skastel

There it sits, with three things on it: Call Ryan Email Mom Go get prints framed And every time I look at it, I avoid it.  It’s not like these are complicated, deep-thinking, back-breaking kind of issues.  They’re just reminders … Continue reading →

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The foggy season has arrived

Posted on December 31, 2011 by skastel

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Technical Austerity

Posted on December 30, 2011 by skastel

I’ve been reading a lot of economics articles recently and have been thinking about our current debt crisis. From a Keynesian perspective, the government should be heavily investing anywhere it can to offset the lack of private investment. The politically … Continue reading →

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Why I love (and hate) working from home

Posted on November 12, 2011 by skastel

Since moving to San Francisco a few months ago I’ve been working out of my house. It’s pretty awesome, I have done it once before for an extended period of time so I kind of know my way around the … Continue reading →

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Test Driven Refactoring

Posted on October 14, 2011 by skastel

I was working on refactoring and updating some code that was written by another team of developers today and eventually found myself in the whack-a-mole cycle of “Commit-Ship to QA-Find Bugs-Commit” for a few iterations. The project had unit tests, … Continue reading →

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Finding an apartment is even harder than they said

Posted on August 16, 2011 by skastel

Back in June I attended O’Reilly Velocity in San Jose and on the first night amidst all the great Ignite talks, there was one titled “How to find a place to live in San Francisco“.  As with most Ignite talks, it … Continue reading →

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Cross country adventure

Posted on August 4, 2011 by skastel

My lovely girlfriend and I have made it to California!  We did it Cannonball Run style, three days of driving 18+ hours.  A few stops for food, gas and bathrooms each day.  One less-than enjoyable motel in Illinois, and one … Continue reading →

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Moving across the country

Posted on June 7, 2011 by skastel

Expect some rather exciting and nerve wracking updates coming in the next few months as my lovely girlfriend, our two cats and of course our ever-dignified rabbit move across the country! I’m from the Cambridge area and have lived here … Continue reading →

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Fearlessness is a good thing, sometimes.

Posted on May 31, 2011 by skastel

In the world of startups the short deadlines and shifting business requirements seem to result in some pretty gnarly code in your organization’s repository. Eventually, you’ll have the unfortunate task of adding a feature or fixing a bug in this … Continue reading →

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Building scalable data systems

Posted on May 23, 2011 by skastel

In my tenure at HubSpot I’ve been on teams that have built and rebuilt various data systems and every time we’ve tried to construct “scalable” solutions. We’ve hit the mark on some projects and been wildly off on others. I’m on … Continue reading →

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