Every successful tech startup has to deal with scaling issues. These can include: building a reliable backend, tweaking the product/messaging for greater mass appeal, and hiring the people necessary to accomplish these goals. Houzz has been lucky enough to do pretty well on these challenges, but early success in hiring ended up creating a new challenge – providing adequate facilities for all the employees. Through clever rearrangement of our open seating plan, we were able to

Data pipelines manage some of the most important tasks for a web company. As data comes in from users, it needs to come right back out as improved user experiences and provide fresh analytics to the team as quickly as possible. I was quite proud of having built an easy to use pipeline framework at Houzz that made it simple to add new mapreduce jobs, hive/impala queries and data transfers, while integrating them seamlessly with existing jobs. The framework grew with the needs