Jonathan enjoys building large-scale, distributed systems that crash and burn when being deployed into production. He prefers NoSQL over relational databases and can refactor like a mad banshee.
He loves programming, so much so that he dreams in C# and has nightmares about legacy code. He wears Transformers pajamas.
A few years ago, he staged a full-scale coup d'état and burned down the ivory tower where the software architects lived. Then, he sang and frolicked and danced about with the rest of the lowly software developers.
When he’s angry, he mumbles to himself and types more loudly on his keyboard. When he’s happy he mumbles to himself and types loudly on his keyboard as well.
You can read more about his blathering and rants on his blog: http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/joliver; my proof: https://keybase.io/joliver/sigs/mg2KjhltwbuIV56Bt8iNzXVJjv1l_Q-N0K3F4o3efeY ]
Submissions
Ask HN: Best way to design an API authentication mechanism?
4 points·by jonathanoliver··2 comments
I Was On Page One of Hacker News–Here's What I Learned
Founder of Smarty here, so there's some obvious bias.
We've been in the geocoding space for over 12+ years. A geocoding API should be easy to set up, deliver rooftop-accurate geocodes, be transparent about accuracy, persist in perpetuity, have a clear pricing structure, and be lightning fast.
Smarty has geocodes for 210 million US addresses, including 20 million non-USPS addresses. Our US Rooftop Geocoding product is 97% accurate to the rooftop or parcel of the property. Perpetual use of our geocoding data is also available, and Smarty does have licensing available for re-syndicating lat/long points in your APIs. Our entry-level plans for US Rooftop Geocoding have rate limits of 25,000 addresses/second. (Most customers won't reach this speed, but you're welcome to try.)
The best way to determine a company's geocoding accuracy is to test their products directly.
We use Nomad where I work and we LOVE it. Previous to Nomad we used K8s for several years which, at that point, allowed us to become cloud agnostic. With the move to Nomad about 3+ years ago, we were able to transition away from cloud and back to leased, bare metal machines. During our time with K8s, it didn't have a good bare-metal strategy with their ingress mechanism. In contrast, as we investigated Nomad, it was easy to deploy on pure metal without a hypervisor. The result of our migration to Nomad was having so many capable and far-less-expensive hosting options. Lastly, as part of our Nomad control plane, we also adopted Vault and Consul with great success.
I know there are horror stories around this acquisition and lots of predictions about what will happen, but only time will tell. On a minimum, it has been a delight to use the Hashicorp software stack along with the approach they brought to our engineering workflow (remember Vagrant?). These innovations and approaches aren't going away.
Send your address to [email protected] and link to this HN thread. I’ll keep an eye watching out for it. I’d love to see what our system does with your address.
We have non-postal addresses and a lot of other mechanisms to help here. We also have contacts at the USPS and others to help fix addresses.
Regarding article, it really depends on the use case of whether to use ZIP Code (TM), postal code, Canada Post Forward Sortation Area, lat/lon, Census Bureau block and tract, etc.
As has been noted, the ZIP Code is often good enough for aggregating data together and can be a good first step if you don’t know where to start.
A.Z. Fell has a decent bookshop but when I called recently they said: "Fell's Bookshop. We probably don't have what you're looking for and we wouldn't sell it to you if we did."
I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver. Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native experience rather than through the editor abstractions because it forced me to learn.
I've been running Arch Linux for about 2 years two high-powered desktop machines (home and work). I run `sudo pacman -Syu` every day and I've only had one video driver update (nvidia) that broke me. I had to login from the CLI (which I'm using all the time anyway) to rollback and pin the version.
It's been an incredibly smooth experience.
That said, the one thing that I still haven't migrated over to fully is Linux on a laptop. I'm macOS on an Apple MacBook Pro 14" (powered by Apple's M1 Pro).
He loves programming, so much so that he dreams in C# and has nightmares about legacy code. He wears Transformers pajamas.
A few years ago, he staged a full-scale coup d'état and burned down the ivory tower where the software architects lived. Then, he sang and frolicked and danced about with the rest of the lowly software developers.
When he’s angry, he mumbles to himself and types more loudly on his keyboard. When he’s happy he mumbles to himself and types loudly on his keyboard as well.
You can read more about his blathering and rants on his blog: http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/joliver; my proof: https://keybase.io/joliver/sigs/mg2KjhltwbuIV56Bt8iNzXVJjv1l_Q-N0K3F4o3efeY ]