Category Archives: Uncategorized

Rapleaf makes extensive use of Thrift‘s CompactProtocol to save space for long-term data storage and for communicating between services. However, this summer, star Rapleaf intern Armaan Sarkar took us to a new level of compact-ness with his work on the new TupleProtocol. While we are completely happy with the CompactProtocol for permanent data storage and [...]

Have a cool idea for a product related to data or personalization? We’ll help you build it! We just launched the Rapleaf Personalization Fund, which provides $1 million of cash and in-kind awards (plus invaluable support from our partners) for cool startups that integrate with our data. The fund is being launched in partnership with [...]

We use Ruby on Rails pretty heavily at Rapleaf, and we use Rails migrations to manage our database schemas. While Rails migrations are a great way to manage the schema for a single database, we have multiple production databases. Managing multiple schemas has been a bit of a pain point for us in the past, [...]

Some doctors watch Grey’s Anatomy to relax, and some engineers code for fun when they’re not coding. Well, those engineers are us. Ben P. decided to kick off an internal game of code golf , which we’re hoping will be the first of many. The objective is to solve a certain problem with the fewest [...]

Few times are more sacred on Rapleaf’s calendar than F-week, which occurs at the end of each engineering quarter. For the duration of F-week engineers are encouraged to tackle tasks unrelated to their regular work pursuits. Some choose to create prototype projects they hope will become future team goals, others work on internal tools, while [...]

Last week was our quarterly Hackleaf, and this time around a handful of us set out to solve a slightly more physical problem than we usually tackle: conference room abuse. We have nine conference rooms in our office these days, and even though we regularly use Google Calendar to schedule meetings, we still struggle with [...]

Ever since we got a ping-pong table in the office a few months ago, table tennis has taken off in a pretty big way at Rapleaf. Not too long ago we started up a simple ladder in order to keep track of the One True Pong Champion. As you can see, Sean (“scar”) Carr is [...]

One of the most interesting things that we do at Rapleaf is use our existing data to deduce or infer new data. For example, a person’s name is often highly correlated with a specific gender. After doing lots and lots of regression, we usually end up with a simple HashMap loaded from a file that [...]

Rapleaf started out using Ruby and Rails extensively to build out our systems. We loved the flexibility that it gave us to quickly put together a functional application. Tools like ActiveRecord are huge productivity boosters, saving us the trouble of hand-coding database interaction and letting us focus directly on our application. However, we evolved to [...]