The big sort | Seth’s Blog

The phone book was a groundbreaking innovation. For the first time, you could actually look up the person you were seeking to reach. At about the same time, the department store arrived. You could actually have a shot at finding what you were hoping to buy. TV Guide was, at one time, the most valuable…

Why Most Marketers Stay Stuck

Generally, companies don’t like to give promotions. They are expensive and risky. The company has to spend extra money to put a known entity into an unknown situation. There is a risk of failure that didn’t exist before. This is a sweeping generalisation, but it’s a useful one. You probably deserve a promotion, but on…

Evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure: Lessons and progress

A few months ago, we launched an overhaul of Intercom’s database architecture with Vitess and PlanetScale. Already, we’re seeing transformative results: zero-downtime maintenance, 90%+ performance improvement for our most demanding queries, and a more resilient infrastructure that scales in days, not months. In our previous post, we shared how we’re overhauling Intercom’s database architecture to…