Dating DNA on Justin Carmony

A New Chapter In My Career - Deseret Digital Media

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:49:22 +0000

As several people know by now, I have accepted a position at Deseret Digital Media as Director of Development. For those who don’t know, Deseret Digital Media is owned by the LDS Church, and is in charge of all the web & mobile technology for the church’s for-profit companies. This includes KSL.com, DeseretBook.com, DeseretNews.com, and several others. I will be the Director of Development for Deseret News’s website, mobile applications, etc.

For the last four years I’ve been working at Dating DNA, LLC as the CTO, and have enjoyed every moment. It has been a great ride and a lot of work. When I started we had one website on one server. Dating DNA now has over 40 iPhone Apps, several APIs powering the apps, and dozens of servers and services. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience scaling and doing just about everything from the servers to the front-end. From only a thousand users to reaching millions of users and devices, it has been a wonderful experience.

MySQL, Redis, and a Billion Rows - A Love Story

Mon, 23 May 2011 15:20:35 +0000

This last week we pushed live a very large architecture change for Dating DNA. For those who know me, and have heard me talk about the Dating DNA Scoring System, they know how big of a problem we faced. For those who don’t know, let me give some background:

The Problem

With Dating DNA, our goal was to display a compatibility score with every other user. This score is generated by taking two sets of answers to our 20 page survey, and running it through our algorithm. While it is super convenient for our users, this poses a problem. We wanted not only for people to be able to visit a profile and see a score, which is easy to generate a score on demand. We wanted our users to be able to browse other profiles sorted by their score with them. This requires us to pre-generate and store these scores, and then later query them.

How I Became a Web Developer & CTO

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:57:56 +0000

Note: many of the screenshots of websites I had done in the past are from the Internet Archive and many of the images are missing. But it can give an idea on the projects I had worked on. One day I’ll try and track down the original files and update the screenshots.

Today some memories came from when I first started with web development. So before I forget anymore of the details, I thought I would share my unique way I became a web developer. I never went to school to learn Computer Science or Information Systems. I’ve had a total of 2 programming classes, which were my in sophomore and junior years of High School, one of which we lovingly nicknamed Warcraft 101, because we would spend the entire time getting out butts kicked in Warcraft 2 by my classmate Daren (We all got A’s, we had just finished the entire coursework in 2 and a half weeks).

New Job: CTO of Dating DNA

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 06:45:02 +0000

I’ve had a few friends ask me about my current employment, and if I ended up switching jobs. So I thought I would answer them here, or at least have somewhere to point them to. The answer is: yes and no.

A quick recap: a few months ago I was given the chance to apply for a position at ARUP Laboratories, which is the medical testing facility for the University of Utah. It is a great company to work for, and listed by Forbes’ as one of best companies to work for. During the interview process, when I made it past the initial rounds and was invited down to interview in person with the developer team, I told my biggest client (Dating DNA) I was interviewing with ARUP. If I got the job, I wouldn’t be able to do the same volume of work they needed from me, and they would have to find someone else.

New Dating DNA Front Page

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:04:16 +0000

Since we’re still pending in the Apple iPhone App Store for review, we wanted a new fresh image for the Dating DNA website front page. Kevin, the CEO, threw together a simplified new front page. He is pretty good with Photoshop, and knows how to slice up a layout for image and put it into HTML. I know he did it using tables (I know, every serious web developer alive is chringing right now), which works for now. I like the general idea and execution. I think we can polish and refine it a great deal more, but I thought I would get people’s opinions.