Optimizing joins in Redshift

Recently at Affinity, we accelerated our analytics workloads on Redshift by optimizing our use of joins. In this blog post, we begin by sharing the general takeaways that you can apply as you optimize your Redshift queries. We then share our step-by-step journey in which we apply these takeaways to…

How we used Postgres extended statistics to achieve a 3000x speedup

Much like the DMV, the PostgreSQL query planner is a powerful, mysterious entity to whom we semi-blindly entrust our well-being. It has the crucial responsibility of picking the most efficient execution plan for every query. Here we’ll explore what data Postgres takes into account when creating query plans, and how…

Scaling Incident Response At Affinity

It’s 3pm. You’re surveying all your snack options because it’s that time of day. You feel your phone vibrate, take a peek — oh shit, “@channel the site is down right now”. You start sprinting back to your desk. This is the moment you’ve been training your whole life for…

Early Experiences with Kubernetes: Debugging Unresponsive Nodes

Building a highly responsive sheet view with React Native

Affinity Design Principles

Alive, Empowering, Progressive, Unified We crafted our principles to provide the lens through which all our design decisions are made — from brand and marketing to product design, from the smallest pixel to…

Affinity Named One of Fortune’s Best Workplaces for 2020

At Affinity, we know we’re nothing without our employees. That’s why cultivating a workplace environment that supports and strengthens professional relationships is as important to us as any feature of our platform. Even during a tumultuous 2020, as the remote office became the norm, we wanted to foster a culture…

Learn Fast and Read Things: why (and how) we started a technical reading group

At Affinity, we strive to make time not only for those things that are urgent — fixing bugs, shipping features, supporting our customers — but also for those things that are important but never urgent. Learning is one of those key priorities: there’s rarely an urgent, short-term reason to spend…

An Interview with Joshua Goldenberg, Head of Design at Slack

Introducing Design at Affinity 👋

Hey-o! Welcome to Affinity Design’s learnings and stories from our journey to redesign how businesses manage and leverage their networks. We’ll be posting along with our talented engineering team to talk about how we build Affinity together. Affinity is a relationship intelligence platform to expand and evolve the traditional…

Design at Affinity

Scaling Postgres at Affinity with Citus

Joe Lonsdale on Investing Your Time at Your First Job

Affinity Design Library

Design as a craft is largely a product of labor — design-thinking, hands-on pixel pushing, creating documentation — all in the process of transforming an idea into reality. But what we read can say a lot about how we think, where those ideas come from, and ultimately, how we design. …

Sharing code between web & React Native: Why & how to configure Metro for code sharing

Migrating Large PostgreSQL Columns to DynamoDB

Running Parallel Jobs on CircleCI

Designing Engineer Onboarding at Affinity

There…

Understanding Tricky Joins and Multi-Table Updates in PostgreSQL (Using Boolean Algebra!)

Build a Staging Site in 15 Minutes

Background At Affinity, we do a big deploy of our main branch once per day, and smaller deploys of specific features or bug fixes throughout the day. We’ve found that this provides a good…

To Affinity and Beyond — Thoughts from my Internship

Hey, everyone, thanks for clicking on my blog post! A bit about myself — I’m a CS student currently taking a gap year before finishing out my senior year of college. After switching from pre-medicine to CS my junior fall and completing an internship with a big bank that…

Migrating to TypeScript: Five Practical Tips

Our strategy was fairly straightforward: first we added types to our core data models, and then we began writing new code…

The Path to Design Leadership: A Recap from SF Design Week 2018

This year at San Francisco Design Week, we had the opportunity to chat with Andy Montgomery, Head of Design at Square Capital; Deny Khoung, Director of Design at 8VC; Faith Bolliger, VP of Design at SoFi; and Wesley Yun, Senior Manager of Product Design at Uber Freight on design leadership…

Diving into mobile with React Native

Beyond culture fit: non-technical hiring criteria for engineers

We’ve taken this principle to heart and are careful never…