Eight Ways You've Misconfigured Your A/B Test

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You've read about the virtues of A/B testing feature releases. You love iterating quickly, testing quickly, and continually learning in a data-driven fashion. You appreciate the importance of keeping an eye on the statistics behind your testing, and perhaps you even use a tool or two to make sure your results are statistically valid.

But, you ran a test last week, the results have been coming in for some time now, but, the data just doesn't look quite right.

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The Life of a Last Minute New York City Restaurant Reservation

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There's been a lot of hoopla recently about so-called high frequency restaurant reservation trading. Are computers stealing my reservations? Will I ever get into Per Se again? It's Saturday night, I have a hot date but no table, am I screwed?

Last Wednesday, I launched Last Minute Eatin', a same day reservation service that tweets New York's hottest tables. While the service has only been running publicly for a couple of days now, I've been running it silently for quite some time, and it's been monitoring thousands of restaurants for several months now.

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Last Minute Eatin’ Launches; Gets You the Hottest Table in Town

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Do you love eating out but hate making plans? There’s nothing worse than trying to find a great table when you need it most, only to find that all your favorite places are completely booked. New York City can be expensive, but the thought of eating bad food at a second or third tier restaurant is unpalatable.

Last Minute Eatin’ is an experiment in immediate gratification and schedule free living. When same day restaurant openings come up, they get tweeted from @LastMinuteEatin along with a link to make your reservation on OpenTable. Last Minute Eatin’ continuously monitors thousands of reservation openings and cancellations every day, so if you see a table tweeted, rest assured it’s one of the hottest tables in the city for your last minute plans.

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Coding in the Rain

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It's been rainy here in NYC as of late. Just about the only thing worse than 90 degree city heat is 90 degree city heat with intense thunderstorms roaring through. So I find myself indoors when it rains, crunching data, writing code, checking into GitHub.

Of course I'm not unique here. There are thousands of other GitHub coders in New York and millions of contributors worldwide. The data scientist inside of me asks questions. Is it possible to measure these effects? And if so, exactly how much more do people code when it's rainy?

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