How Grow Used FullStory to Drive an 8X Increase in Onboarding Conversion

We knew there was friction in our Slack App onboarding experience-we just didn't know what to do about it. FullStory revealed the onboarding experience in a way that made it easy to understand-and gave us an idea how to fix it.

Jun 26 2019 · 4 minute read

The 3 hottest trends in people analytics right now

Grow fits into the future of work by incorporating three people analytics trends: Organizational Network Analysis, individual development through team collaboration, and intelligent nudging.

Apr 9 2019 · 4 minute read

Predicting Cuisine Demand in NYC using the Weather

An analysis using predictive models to understand how weather will affect demand for specific cuisines in New York City.

Nov 5 2018 · 3 minute read

Takeaways From DigitaLatest: An Essential Summit for Marketing Executives

Five of my Cornell Tech peers and I were fortunate enough to attend the DigitaLatest conference organized by Michelle Greenwald. Throughout the conference we learned from each company about what makes them unique, how to leverage those differentiators to market more successfully, and about big picture trends. I’m going to focus this blog post on the final category: my takeaways on the big picture trends as perceived by multiple tech titans.

Aug 12 2018 · 5 minute read

Agile MBAs: Cornell Tech Students Reflect and Grow Together

I made so many new and diverse friends this summer in gorgeous Ithaca, NY. This is where my classmates and I spent the first three months of our Cornell Tech MBA program. A common goal that unites us is fusing technology with business and creative thinking - a core tenet of the Cornell Tech MBA. We also share the premise that the rapid pace of innovation in the digital age calls for a new approach to the way we learn, collaborate, and craft our experience. With that in mind, as our MBA class of 2019 approached the end of our summer semester in Ithaca, we wanted to crystallize our experiences by reflecting on what had gone well, what could be improved, and what actions we should take going forward.

Aug 8 2018 · 3 minute read

Summary of Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

Certain to Win dissects historical warfare strategies through the lens of John Boyd's OODA Loop and derives principles that can be applied to business. Richards argues that we can apply the principles of warfare to the challenges of operating a business because business is a zero sum game played by a 'team' in stressful and uncertain situations. Here are the key concepts...

Jun 7 2018 · 4 minute read

HashChain Technology Inc: An Economic Analysis

This analysis is focused on HashChain Technologies, Inc. They were founded on August 15th, 2017 and operate in the rapidly expanding cryptocurrency market. On September 25th, 2017 raised $4.4M and went public on December 18th, 2017 on TSXV with a ticker symbol KASH. Their market capitalization upon IPO was $108M, however after a 2:1 split on February 5th, 2018 and significant losses in stock price, their market capitalization is now $21.5M.

Jun 5 2018 · 10 minute read

Component Driven Development with GraphQL and Apollo

A presentation I gave at the React Dev Summit talking about building reusable components based on a shared language, design system, and component system.

Mar 27 2018 · 1 minute read

Technical Project Management at Codesmith.io

In this presentation I teach the students at Codesmith.io about the fundamentals and principles of technical projcet management. I then discuss processes and tools that could enable them to successfully deliver results.

Mar 24 2018 · 1 minute read

Two Tips to Improve Performance by 30 percent with React and Webpack

In this post I'll talk about the front-end optimizations TpT made to boost webpagetest Speedindex performance by 30 percent!

Aug 16 2017 · 4 minute read

Reducing Elixir Backend Time From 120ms to 20ms With Parallelization

TpT takes performance seriously since it is widely accepted that performance delights users, increases Search Engine rankings and improves conversion rate. In this post, we’ll talk about how we reduced our product page upper 90th percentile response time from 120ms to 20ms.

Aug 2 2017 · 4 minute read

How Teachers Pay Teachers Uses JIRA on Product Teams

Take a deep dive into TpT's JIRA process and workflow

Jul 5 2017 · 4 minute read

Streaming Video Infrastructure on TpT using EvaporateJS, Verk, AWS, PHP, and Kaltura

This post outlines our video processing infrastructure and dives deeply into some of the technical issues we faced while releasing our minimal viable streaming video product.

Jun 30 2017 · 7 minute read

Challenges faced while scaling to serve millions of views per day on AWS using Kubernetes, React, PHP, and Elixir

TpT's product page receives ~2 million pages views per day making it the most heavily trafficked page on TpT. We decided to use a simple UI refresh as an opportunity to migrate the page to our new tech stack. This post dives deeply into the challenges we overcame while scaling the product page on our new infrastructure!

Jun 20 2017 · 10 minute read

AWS Serverless Architecture for Statically Hosted Single Page Applications

A detailed guide to building, deploying and hosting applications on serverless infrastructure.

Jun 3 2017 · 5 minute read

A/B Testing Using React, GraphQL and Apollo

Here at Teachers Pay Teachers, we want to ensure that any change we make to our site benefits our community of educators. In order to do this effectively we take an extraordinarily data driven approach to releasing code. This post shares the details of TpT's A/B testing implementation.

Jun 3 2017 · 3 minute read

Ryan Belongs at Cornell Tech

The essay I used to apply to Cornell Tech's MBA program

Jun 3 2016 · 8 minute read

Dimensions of Coffee

A small presentation I gave while working at Bridgewater Associates about the various dimensions that effect the flavor of coffee

Apr 1 2016 · 1 minute read