Author Archives: Eric Naeseth

A primer on Python decorators

April 10, 2012 – 7:55 pm

Python allows you, the programmer, to do some very cool things with functions. In Python, functions are first-class objects, which means that you can do anything with them that you can do with strings, integers, or any other objects. For example, you can assign a function to a variable: >>> def square(n): … return n [...]

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How we got people to earn our schwag

March 15, 2012 – 7:00 pm

This year, Thumbtack was one of the sponsors of the PyCon conference. Our sponsorship got us a booth in the conference’s expo hall, and hence the opportunity to tell people what we’re all about. Everybody with a booth wants to give visitors something to take home, which inevitably leads to the tide of mediocre schwag [...]

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Building our own tracking engine with MongoDB

May 3, 2011 – 1:25 pm

There are few things we love more than understanding how people are using Thumbtack. Whenever possible, we use direct interactions with our users to learn about their experience. We perform usability tests, in which members of our design team will sit down with a user, ask them to do something on Thumbtack, and watch how [...]

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