TradeMe: We're hiring!

Two TradeMe techies have used their opportunity to speak at Tech.Ed to make a plea for skilled tech experts to join their ranks.

TradeMe head of infrastructure, Matt Van Deventer, and head of database, David Curlewis, told their audience that the site's IT department has plenty of ideas but can't find the staff to implement them.

"We send 2.5 million emails a day," Van Deventer says.

"There aren't many legitimate users sending that many emails.

"We'd really like to consolidate our architecture, we just need the people to do it, so if you've got some good ideas, please get in touch.

The pair also had plenty of advice for conference attendees.

Van Deventer says one of the most important things to the TradeMe organisation is monitoring and measuring.

"Particularly in the early years," Van Deventer says, "we always wanted to know what was going on and where we were going to hit our next bottlenecks.

"Later, as you get bigger, it can let you know how you're growing and how fast you're growing.

Curlewis discussed the TradeMe database structure, before giving the audience some insight into dealing with malfunctions.

"One thing we've found is when things go wrong, it's the users that know first, and our users are pretty much all of New Zealand.

"Social media has been kind of a double-edged sword, where before Twitter we would get away with outages for five or ten minutes, but now when we're down it's on the front page of Stuff in three minutes.

"If something breaks, you need to know before anyone else.

Van Deventer also recommends utilising alerts rather than constantly checking logs.

 "You can buy a bunch of solutions from the big companies, but there's actually heaps of stuff you can do out of the box.

Image: TradeMe speakers Matt Van Deventer, left, and David Curlewis.