Posts By

Kimberly Nicholls

Measuring Aurora query IO with Batch experiments
Measuring Aurora query IO with Batch experiments

Running production-scale tests with AWS Batch showed that using SQLAlchemy to modify only changed rows reduced our Storage IO costs, as well as the accumulation of dead tuples in our database.

Migrating to Aurora: easy except the bill
Migrating to Aurora: easy except the bill

Pay for usage sounds good, but how you use the database is key. Migrating our production database from Postgres to Aurora was easy, until we noticed that our daily database costs more than doubled. Our increased costs were driven by…

Fresh baked software
Fresh baked software

In the olden days, software used to come in a box. Now, we can make sure our users always have fresh baked software.

Friendly robots
Friendly robots

A tale of robots, gold stars, and code coverage. At Gridium, we have a Hubot named Gort running in our Slack channels. He does all sorts of useful stuff for us: deploying code, printing the company mailing address, showing the…

A stage environment for Ember apps
A stage environment for Ember apps

In a previous blog article, I described how we deploy Ember apps to S3 buckets, and promised a follow up article about how we use a staging bucket to preview changes before pushing to production. In this article, I’ll describe…

Deploying Ember apps to S3 and Cloudfront
Deploying Ember apps to S3 and Cloudfront

How serving Ember apps from S3 and Cloudfront simplified dev environments, sped up builds and deploys, and made our production infrastructure smaller and more scalable Gridium’s Tikkit application has three separate front-end Ember apps that all talk to a common…

Search inside attachments with AWS Elasticsearch
Search inside attachments with AWS Elasticsearch

Gridium’s Tikkit work order management system runs on a microservices architecture, with Docker containers managed by Kubernetes.  We’ve divided our application into small, reusable components, each of which runs in its own Docker container.  Kubernetes takes care of keeping the right…

Fast prototyping with AWS
Fast prototyping with AWS

I recently spent about a week working on a prototype for a new product idea. Another engineer and I needed to put something together quickly, so we could get feedback from potential customers that will inform the product. We already…

Gridium Labs: Playground for data science
Gridium Labs: Playground for data science

At Gridium, we have lots and lots of smart meter data. We have meter readings every 15 minutes for hundreds of thousands of meters, for thousands of days. We also have meter characteristics such as latitude and longitude, building square…