Whether you’re fundraising, selling to startups or looking to acquire a company, Crunchbase is the go-to spot for entrepreneurial intelligence. But as a wiki, it lacks an interface for broader questions like the following: Who has recently invested in mobile companies’ seed rounds? Which investors have the best track record? Which companies recently raised at least $10M? Founders... Continue reading »

Good news everyone! We’ve just launched a new tool for slicing, filtering, and exploring Crunchbase data. We call it: the Crunchinator!

This is the first of what will be a series of posts describing the technical details of the Crunchinator’s implementation. I’ll give a brief overview of some of the technologies we used to build the project and then... Continue reading »

If you’ve never read Tina Fey’s book “Bossypants”, it’s worth your time. Tina Fey is a fantastic comedy writer. She also knows something about how to build a team of software engineers.

In one chapter, she talks about managing a team of comedy writers. It’s the same dynamic you see on 30 Rock, and I’m talking about... Continue reading »

I am primarily a Ruby on Rails developer who was tasked with learning and working the Play framework. After using the Play framework for several months, I have found the documentation lacking. Like Ruby on Rails, it is simple to go from nothing to a working, running MVC app. Unlike Rails, there are very few examples and tutorials to move forward form the basic application.

Faker is a Ruby library designed to generate various types of fake data, including, among several others, realistic "names, addresses, and phone numbers." It uses I18n locales for storing the fake data strings and formats, and out of the box, it provides the ability to set the locale via the Faker::Config.locale attribute. However, it is also possible to extend the Faker::Base class if you... Continue reading »

"Code smells". "Technical debt". These are the kind of things that engineers know about. Some amount is ok, but too much will shutdown a project -- even a company. EBay famously had so much technical debt that the company nearly shut down in the late 90s.

The next (and smart) question to ask is "How much is too much?" This is an area that... Continue reading »