Mahalo 4.0 Launched

Last Tuesday morning, after 6 months of working on it, the Mahalo team launched our newest version of the site: Mahalo 4.0. I have a lot of thoughts on what went well and what could have been better during the whole process, but I’m going to save those for later. We had a nearly flawless cutover (technology-wise) It total our downtime was only about 3 hours, and for most of that it would have been unnoticeable to most visitors.  Not bad for a complete rewrite of our backend storage layer and our front-end js/css/html. We’re still working on some bugs, but that … Continue reading Mahalo 4.0 Launched

Life-Mod: No Soap

Back in December, a co-worker sent me an article (this one I think), written by a guy who had decided to give up soap and shampoo for a month and seemed none the worse for it. At the time I was looking for some good things to experiment with and this one required no additional time from my schedule and cut some chemicals out of my daily routine, so I quit showering with soap and shampoo on December 6th, 2010 (note: I still showered. I’m not a hippy). The only real caveats I have to applying chemicals to my skin … Continue reading Life-Mod: No Soap

Lessons Learned from a Coding Sprint

We spent the month of October at Mahalo pushing really hard on the tech side of things to try to get some new products built. The plan was to set aggressive goals in the past few weeks of September and then spend October trying to complete those goals for every team. If we met the goals, then each team member would get a reward. It was a great chance for the team to really show what they were capable of and bond through their mutual struggles. (and from a more stoic standpoint, help them appreciate the times when they’re not … Continue reading Lessons Learned from a Coding Sprint