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Hey, it's Pete. I'm here in Silicon Valley today and I'm talking to Vida Ha, who's the
co-founder of Ifeelgoods. Hey, Vida.
VIDA: Hi
PETE: How are you doing today?
VIDA: Great.
PETE: Are you excited?
VIDA: Yes
PETE: You pumped?
VIDA: Yes
PETE: Good. So in this episode of g33ktalk, we're going to talk to Vita about her technology
stack and we have some really interesting things we're going to talk about. Some infrastructure
stuff, we're going to talk about how to stop and prevent online fraud, which is pretty
cool. We're going to talk about some various data related stuff that you guys are dabbling
in and using, which is cool. And yeah, we're just going to generally geek out and have
a good time. Are you ready?
VIDA: Sounds great
PETE: Alright. So, Vita, you were previously at Google, right?
VIDA: Yes
PETE: And now your role here is co-founder of Ifeelgoods
VIDA: And Lead Engineer
PETE: Lead Engineer. Okay, cool. So tell us a little bit about Ifeelgoods, what you guys
do, just so we have some context to as what your application is and what you guys are
doing.
VIDA: Yes. We are a digital goods incentive platform. That's big jargon that basically
says we power the redemption of free digital goods. Things like Facebook credits, Skype
minutes, E-gift cards, anything that's instantly redeemable, that can be delivered electronically,
so that retailers can offer them to consumers in place of discounts.
PETE: Okay. So give me a typical use case, like how would a customer or where would a
customer see your service in a purchase flow for e-commerce site, for instance?
VIDA: Right, so they would see banners that we would host on the retailers' side that
talks about the offers. So maybe in place of free shipping, you would get $5 worth of
free Facebook credits instead. And then at the end of the flow, after the receipt confirmation
page, you'd see a widget that's hosted by us. We actually do the whole front end part
of it also. You'd Facebook connect, click it, we know who your identity is and then
we deposit credits directly into your account.
PETE: Okay. So this could be an incentive, alongside an actual, it could be a hardware
that's purchased, or some sort of incentive or digital promotion that is just powered
by you guys.
VIDA: Exactly. You get to use the Facebook credits immediately today even if it takes
a week for your new shoes or whatever to arrive.
PETE: Okay, okay, cool. Tell me a little bit about your technology stack. What are you
guys using and what are you built on?
VIDA: We are using Ruby on Rails as our web development framework on top of Amazon, EC2
services all over the board. We also have to know Facebook APIs, all the things like
that.
PETE: Okay. You mentioned before that you guys are using a lot of different parts of
the AWS stack, run me through those quickly.
VIDA: There is, EC2, which is the servers that we actually run. There's RDS which is
our main SQL style database. We also use Simple DB, which is a more, a more new flavor kind
of SQL database. And then there's also S3 for storage. So we use that both for any kind
of large data that we want to save for offline processing as well as just images, creatives,
like things that go on our website on our redemption flow. And then we use a couple
of the other services. There is the load balancing layer that we use automatically with Amazon,
Elastic MapReduce.
PETE: Cool. So you're all the way in the cloud. Do you have any servers at all?
VIDA: No.
PETE: Do you have a backup server somewhere?
VIDA: No. You can back up things on Amazon.
PETE: Alright. A lot of people use it for that, right? S3 is cheap.
VIDA: They triplicate everything, typically. So I'm not worried about it.
PETE: Okay, Cool. Have you ever had an Amazon outage, just out of curiosity?
VIDA: No.
PETE: No? Alright.
VIDA: We've been lucky enough to not be hit with that problem.
PETE: Cool. Well if Amazon is listening, I'm sure they would like to hear that.