Consul is awesome, and super powerful, but takes a bit of understanding and setting up. We are looking at it now, because it could let us keep the same mechanism in place in development as we might use in production.
How do you do Products?
Redbubble recently hosted an event called “How do you manage products?” in conjunction with Product Anonymous (a Melbourne based product group), with a focus on the art of product management, both from a digital and physical perspective. Redbubble welcomed speakers from Redbubble, Envato & Zendesk and played to a packed house of over 70 people. Redbubble is a two-sided marketplace with over 350,000 Artists, 13 Million designs, delivering to over 236 countries. This involves physical product development and digital product development, building a world-class digital user experience.
Upgrading Solr from 3.6.x to 4.10.x
Every day hundreds of thousands of users come to Redbubble searching for art works. Given the large number of works on Redbubble – we host millions of works for our ever-growing community of artists – it’s important that our search engine return good results, because our users sure ain’t going to paginate through millions of works! Standing between us and our quest to produce relevant search results was our 3-year old Solr 3.6. It’s not so much the age that was bothering us, but rather its lack of boolean and relevance functions. Add in the fact that Solr 3.6’s higher memory demand was causing occasional performance problems, we had a solid case to say goodbye to this fella. So we
Video: Stop Guessing! Talk to your Users and find out the Whys
Tom shares our collaborative team process where everyone participates in planning and moderating with customer sessions to discover the right answers. Questions about the talk? Leave them in the comments!
Automated infrastructure testing with ServerSpec
By using automated rspec testing of our real infrastructure systems, Redbubble has reduced the uncertainty around its operating environments, and decreased the amount of manual correctness checking that engineers have to do when provisioning new systems.
Generating font icon files from the command line
Here at Redbubble, all of our icons are fonts. The vector goodness give us lovely sharp images on even the highest resolution displays. Up until now, we’ve used the excellent fontello.com to generate our font files from a number of icon sets, but our growing team has made managing our configuration file difficult. I’m a big fan of using robots for repetitive tasks, so I threw together a rake task that automates the process! This task allows us to drop individual SVG files into a folder, and automagically generates all of our font files in TTF, WOFF and EOT formats. It is even smart enough to generate a SCSS file with all of the mappings. Robots!
RB Presents: “Stop Guessing! Talk to your Users to Find the Whys”
Redbubble is hosting a series of events where the web technology community can come together and discuss some thought-provoking ideas, led by both our own team and members of the community that inspire us. So come in, share a drink and lets talk tech! On May 21st, Redbubble’s Tom Sommer and Abla Hamilton present…… Stop Guessing! Talk to your Users to Find the Whys
The browser side of JavaScript testing
Back in the days… It was 1996 when I started using JavaScript (to be fair it was more playing with it), the web was still in its early days, and the majority of the Internet sites consisted primarily of static html files served by an Apache Web server. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator were battling for supremacy (remember the first browser war?), and the software engineering industry was still dominated by fat client/server architectures and static programming languages like C and C++ (Java was just starting to make an impression). The steps involved in developing and running a program were to write it, compile it, link it, package it and ultimately deploy and/or execute it, so when Netscape came
RB Presents: Experiences test-driving infrastructure
Redbubble is hosting a series of events where the Melbourne Tech Community can come together and discuss some thought-provoking ideas, led by both our own team and members of the community that inspire us. So come in, share a drink and lets talk tech! On March 18, Redbubble’s Michael Milewski will be presenting “Experiences Test-Driving Infrastructure”
Redbubble at LAST
At Redbubble we are about supporting the communities that love creating. Whether the creation is web products, set work or any engaging experience, it doesn’t matter. It’s our commitment to foster and nurture those that are passionate. One of the initiatives in the web product arena is supporting the LAST Conference (@LASTConf) – a small, local grass roots event all about product development. Craig and Ed the team at LAST work hard to get great speakers and sponsors that live and breathe product and if you have attended, you’d understand it’s a great day.