Category: My Projects
Compliance-Driven Development or the Story Behind Swiftype’s SOC2 Certification
18 Jan2018
Based on my experience, just a decade ago not many people within the Silicon Valley startup community considered compliance an important stepping stone in a company’s development roadmap. And when it came to compliance for startups, it was nearly synonymous with PCI/DSS — mandatory certification used by the credit card industry. Over the last few years though, the rise in the number of startups working with large amounts of private and confidential data (fintech, healthcare, etc) and subsequently the rise in the magnitude of data breaches, led our industry to accept the idea that compliance and certifications are not just for the “big guys”. Nowadays, even very small companies are pressed to go through formal certifications if they want people to trust them with private or confidential data.

That is exactly what happened to Swiftype at the beginning of 2017. While preparing for a public release of our latest product (Swiftype Enterprise Search), we understood that it was going to involve a lot of confidential information and we would need to be able to assure our customers of our capabilities to protect their data. In addition to the marketing aspect, there was a security angle to the problem as well: we were looking for a standard framework that could be used by our small team to ensure the safety of customer data, guiding us through the process. Based on those considerations, we decided to go through a formal SOC 2 certification. In this article, I will describe our journey towards the certification and our findings along the way.

 

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DbCharmer Development: I Give Up
14 Nov2014

About 6 years ago (feels like an eternity in Rails world) working at Scribd I’ve started working on porting our codebase from some old version or Rails to a slightly newer one. That’s when I realized, that there wasn’t a ruby gem to help us manage MySQL connections for our vertically sharded databases (different models on different servers). I’ve started hacking on some code to replace whatever we were using back then, finished the first version of the migration branch and then decided to open the code for other people to use. That’s how the DbCharmer ruby gem was born.

For the next few years a lot of new functionality we needed has been added to the gem, making it more complex and immensely more powerful. I’ve enjoyed working on it, developing those features, contributing to the community. But then I left Scribd, stopped being a user of DbCharmer and the situation drastically changed. For quite some time (years) I would keep fighting to make the code work with newer and newer versions of Rails, struggling to wrap my head around more and more (sometimes useless) abstractions Rails Core team decided to throw into ActiveRecord.

Finally, in the last 2 years (while trying to make DbCharmer compatible with Rails 4.0) it has become more and more apparent, that I simply do not want to do this anymore. I do not need DbCharmer to support Rails 4.0+, while it is very clear that many users need it and constant nagging in the issues and the mailing list, asking for updates generated a lot of anxiety for me, anxiety I couldn’t do much about (the worst kind). As the result, since I simply do not see any good reasons to keep fighting this uphill battle (and developing stuff like this for ActiveRecord IS a constant battle!) I officially give up.

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Interesting Resources for Technical Operations Engineers
23 Sep2013

As a leader of a technical operations team I often have to work on technical operations engineer hiring. This process involves a lot of interviews with candidates and during those interviews along with many challenging practical questions I really love to ask questions like “What are the most important resources you think an Operations Engineer should follow?”, “What books in your opinion are must-read for a techops engineer?” or “Who are your personal heroes in IT community?”. Those questions often give me a lot of information about candidates, their experience, who they are looking up to in the community, what they are interested in, and if they are actively working on improving their professional level.

Recently, one of the candidates asked me to share my lists with him and I thought this information could be valuable to other people so I have decided to share it here on my blog.

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Join Me at Swiftype!
18 Sep2013

As you may have heard, last January I have joined Swiftype – an early stage startup focused on changing local site search for the better. It has been a blast for the past 8 months, we have done a lot of interesting things to make our infrastructure more stable and performant, immensely increased visibility into our performance metrics, developed a strong foundation for the future growth of the company. Now we are looking to expand our team with great developers and technical operations people to push our infrastructure and the product even further.

Since I have joined Swiftype, I have been mainly focused on improving the infrastructure through better automation and monitoring, and worked on our backend code. Now I am looking for a few good operations engineers to join my team to work on a few key projects like building a new multi-datacenter infrastructure, creating a new data storage for our documents data, improving high-availability of our core services and much more.

To help us improve our infrastructure we are looking both for senior operations engineers and for more junior techops people that we could help grow and develop within the company. Both positions could be either remote or we could assist you with relocation to San Francisco if you want to work in our office.

If you are interested, you can take a look at an old, but still pretty relevant post I wrote many years ago on what I believe an ops candidate should know. And, of course, if you have any questions regarding these positions in Swiftype, please email me at kovyrin@swiftype.com or use any other means for contacting me and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. If you know someone who may be a great fit for these positions, please let them know!


New Chapter: Swiftype
31 Jan2013

So, after a few weeks of looking for a new job I’m really excited to start my journey in a young, but very ambitious startup called Swiftype which is focused on developing a technology for private site search, that could be used on everything from small blogs to large product sites. The company is growing really fast and I’m going to lead all the work on infrastructure, build the ops team and hope to get a chance to do some coding along the way.

Stay tuned – I really hope to finally get a chance to do more blogging this year. 🙂