Work Life Balance Featured MFW: How I took back control of my work / life balance What does “work / life balance” really mean? We are all so connected to everything via our various mobile devices, how do you really balance?
Google Cloud Platform GCP Instances, Go To Sleep! How do you keep your developers happily developing? You give them a suspendable cluster development environment on which to work!
techwomen Opening the Door to Future Women Leaders “Whether or not my daughters pursue a career in tech is immaterial, but that needs to be their own choice, not because they didn't have access or exposure to the opportunities."
data Re-Platforming Data @BigCommerce: five second latency on Petabytes of data Many analysts are hailing Data as the new oil. However, contrary to what they're saying, oil is a depleting resource. Data on the other hand, is an expanding resource.
architecture Featured Native & React Native @ BigCommerce Cross-platform tools "... allowed a team of motivated engineers who had never coded mobile apps to create an impressive full-functioning prototype that turned this exploratory project into a product driven venture for our team."
architecture A Simple Architecture for Mobile Apps Whether on-boarding a user, signing in to a service, or simply using a tab-based app with navigation stacks of different screens, almost any app process can be described as a flow of screens and information. It all begins with a start.
leaders Featured VP of Engineering: The first 100 days "I know that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones and ultimately build better products..." - David Hauser, new BigCommerce VP of Engineering, reflects on the first 100 days of his journey.
leaders README.md to Manage Humans If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
techwomen International Women in Tech Visit BigCommerce BigCommerce “inspired me to continuously grow and be a leader of excellence.“ - Elena Chigibaeva, TechWomen Mentee
bigcommerce Kate Walters: From Law to Tech My introduction into development was not a straight path nor a traditional one, but I believe there is value in working with people of all sorts of backgrounds.
engineering Diversity opens doors in product and engineering Software engineer Erica Lloyd moderates a discussion on Diversity and Inclusion in recruiting at Tribe, BigCommerce's employee resource group for women and allies.BigCommerce is full of brilliant, dedicated people focused on revolutionizing the world of e-commerce, with offices in Sydney, San Francisco, and two offices in Austin – corporate headquarters
SydPHP Laravel Talk: BigCommerce at Scale In September 2017, we hosted the SydPHP Laravel meetup [https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/PHP-Laravel-Framework-Sydney/] at our BigCommerce offices in Sydney. Here are the slides for the talk I gave on how we have been scaling our infrastructure. BigCommerce: Running e-Commerce at Scale [//www.slideshare.net/secret/zS3FiyJPAyOeRV] from Ian
ruby BigCommerce, gRPC, and gruf - a Ruby gRPC Framework Today, we'd like to announce the availability of our latest open source project: gruf [https://github.com/bigcommerce/gruf], a Ruby framework for building gRPC services. Over the past year at BigCommerce, we've begun using gRPC [https://www.grpc.io] for our internal services. We believe gRPC provides the standardization
Why the way we look at technical debt is wrong I’ll be straightforward at the start of this post: I firmly believe that the most important issue a company deals with is how it reconciles itself with technical debt. Period. Now, here’s the real point of this post: Technical Debt is a Positive and Necessary Step in software
architecture Iteratively Decoupling Legacy Architecture TL;DR: Move Service Locator calls up the object graph iteratively. ALSO: Poor Man's Dependency Injection breaks testing. Avoid it. More and more, application architecture is migrating towards Dependency Injection to decouple components and ease testing. One of the challenges of applying this to existing applications is how to get
elasticsearch Elasticsearch: Adventures in scaling a multitenant platform Running Elasticsearch at scale can be challenging by itself. When adding multitenancy to the equation it can be hard to know what direction to take. At BigCommerce we use Elasticsearch for all the search features on our clients storefronts. As a SaaS provider we host all sorts of different customers
Advanced MySQL Basics About once a year, there's a blog post from one of the current Tech Unicorns about how they had a big data problem and solved it with a slightly non-standard usage of MySQL. This is a really good thing, because MySQL is an extremely versatile tool. Assembled in a modular
Transaction Isolation Level (TXIL) Subtleties in MySQL Continuing the discussion around transactions, consistency, and MySQL, we consider transaction isolation levels. Setting the TXIL Per Session Remember in MySQL we have auto-commit=1. When you set the transaction isolation level with a statement, that only lasts one transaction if you don't specify the session keyword, so the TXIL
How Much Does Consistency Matter? What's Been Happening Recently Is consistency even important? We know it's contentious. Some people find it extremely important, and we all at least pay lip service to it. But really... how much effort should we put toward making sure we've got it? As you might have noticed, recently we saw
Front-End The “Living” Style Guide - Pattern-Lab Front End style guides have been well publicised recently, with many [http://styleguide.cfapps.io/] examples [http://ux.mailchimp.com/patterns] being made [http://style.codeforamerica.org/] available [http://rizzo.lonelyplanet.com/styleguide/design-elements/colours] for all to see [https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/]. They're a popular and effective way of
AngularJS SF Meetup Bigcommerce's hosted the February Angular SF Meetup [http://www.meetup.com/AngularJS-SF/events/227596489/] and our Front-End Engineer, Alex Taylor [http://www.github.com/alexmckenley] gave the talk: "Unidirectional data flow in Angular 1.x apps" (9.5/10 for that name) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So why is managing application state hard?
Bringing Scala on Board Bringing a new language into an organization can present some pretty interesting challenges. These problems are multiplied by Scala which is not only unfamiliar, but encompasses the entirely different programming model in the form of functional programming. There are many different ways to approach bringing people up to speed on
Front-End How we use Sass Maps for Design Tokens and Developer Happiness When building a design system there is always a set of global, shared properties that become the basis of everything that gets built. This is part of the atom level of the "Atomic Design" principle – the font sizes, weights, line heights, colours, borders, background, spacing, sizing and z-indexes that are
When do I stop testing? Bigcommerce is a highly customer facing product. As many merchants as we support and create on a daily basis, it can be a little nerve-racking to release particularly sensitive functionality such as payments, shipping, tax.. the list is endless. As a Quality Engineer, I try to think of all the
Front-End How we "CSS" at BigCommerce TL;DR Our SASS Style Guide is available on GitHub [https://github.com/bigcommerce/sass-style-guide] CSS is hard. Writing good CSS is harder. Writing good CSS with a big team on a large codebase… wow, just wow. We're not exactly unique as a software company; 120 engineers, 4 offices, 3
