I spent a lot of time this week reading about how different engineering teams have scaled their Hadoop infrastructure. I also spent time looking at consistent hashing strategies, how GitHub manages DNS and routing, and how individual personalities affect team culture and performance. Read on for all the details.

I decided to take some time today to clean up old sprint branches that have been resting in Git unused. Some for well over a year. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish when trying to come up with a workflow. First, I wanted the list of branches that display with the command git branch -a (which I have conveniently aliased to just gb) to be shortened. Second, I didn’t want to lose any of the commits part of old branches. Sure the commits were already merged into the master branch, but I…