Think Big (Page 3)

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

Girl Geek Dinner @ Bigcommerce

Bigcommerce's San Francisco office had the pleasure to host the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner event earlier this month. The topic was on "Pathways to Tech", how Bigcommerce girl geeks with diverse backgrounds are now in tech space. We had MJ Chun (Senior Product Manager), leading the panel discussion with

Team on a Mission

Reflecting back on the past year, I’m proud of the team that we’ve built at Bigcommerce and what we’ve achieved together. No matter how talented any one individual is, there’s a limit to what can be accomplished in isolation. It takes the collaboration of a team

Fun with git - breaking apart a large PR into more manageable chunks

Sometimes a team moves so quickly on a project that they end up with a rather large feature branch in a short amount of time. The sheer size of the change set makes it difficult to merge the feature branch code into the broader code base. On a recent project,

Automated Testing meetup @ Bigcommerce (David Vydra, GE Software)

Last week, Bigcommerce had the opportunity to host the Automated Testing San Francisco meetup [http://www.meetup.com/Automated-Testing-San-Francisco/events/226545162/] in our office. David Vydra [https://www.kifi.com/david-vydra], Manager @ GE Software, was the speaker and the meetup was organized by Leo Cheng [https://twitter.com/leokcheng/]. David's

Puppet and Elastic, Role-Based EC2 Infrastructures

In this post, I'll introduce you to some Amazon EC2 automation concepts and how they can be leveraged to run an elastic, role-based infrastructure. Examples given assume the use of Puppet (Master), but the concept should be portable to other configuration managers, as well as other, conceptually-similar infrastructure providers. Background

SFNode Meetup at Bigcommerce

Last Thursday, we at Bigcommerce had the opportunity to host the november SFNode meetup [http://www.meetup.com/sfnode/]. There were 3 speakers: Rich Trott [https://twitter.com/trott], Joe McCann [https://twitter.com/joemccann], and our very own Mick Ryan [https://twitter.com/evilbits]. Rich Trott on contributing to

TechWomen @ Bigcommerce

During the month of October, Bigcommerce's San Francisco office participated in the U.S. State Department TechWomen [http://www.techwomen.org] program. We hosted two Emerging Leaders, Glacier Bambisa from South Africa and Kenza Khomsi from Morocco. MJ Chun, one of our product managers, mentored Kenza in learning about product

Things I Wish Someone Told Me in 2010 (Bob Lord, CISO @ Yahoo!)

Last week the news broke [https://twitter.com/YahooInc/status/658610580996141056] that Bob Lord would be joining Yahoo! as their new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). He starts his new role in 2 weeks. > Excited to welcome our new Chief Information Security Officer @boblord [https://twitter.com/boblord]! https://t.

Dave Lester: Production-Ready Containers (Using Aurora and Mesos)

This week, we had the pleasure of hosting Dave Lester [https://twitter.com/davelester] in our San Francisco office to give his talk " Production-Ready Containers: Using Aurora and Mesos [https://speakerdeck.com/dlester/production-ready-containers-using-aurora-and-mesos] ". Dave is an Open Source Developer Advocate at Twitter and gave us the rundown of how

Featured

On the Usefulness (Or Lack Thereof) of Foreign Keys

Preamble I recently spoke with Sebastian Machuca (a Sydney-based engineer) about the concept of having FK constraints in Dev and Staging environments, but disabled in Production. Here is the ensuing dialogue, edited for brevity and for making-me-look-like-a-genius. Our dialogue was good, but we were unable to come up with a

Featured

Big Growth in Austin

Four months afterour first acquisition [https://medium.com/@Mr.P/the-strategy-of-mergers-acquisitions-99c31996f691], I’m thrilled to announce that Bigcommerce is expanding to Downtown Austin! We were looking for anoffice befitting a startup [https://medium.com/@Mr.P/when-your-startup-needs-a-bigger-office-1695b8c84755], with the charm and character that would fostercreative work [https://medium.com/@Mr.

Advanced Apache Spark Meetup @ Bigcommerce

Past Thursday, we at Bigcommerce [https://www.bigcommerce.com/] hosted our first Advanced Apache Spark meetup from our SF office on the topic "How Spark Beat Hadoop @ 100 TB Sort" [http://www.meetup.com/Advanced-Apache-Spark-Meetup/events/223665950/]. Thanks to Chris for coming up with such great topics with emphasis on

SFPHP Meetup at Bigcommerce

Last week Bigcommerce hosted the SF PHP User Group [http://www.meetup.com/sf-php/events/224563017/] in our San Francisco office, where around 40 hungry developers gathered to hear me talk about Unit Testing Done Right. This talk covered some of the historical context around unit testing, and how we

What keeps us Go'ing

A while ago I had to opportunity to give a lightning talk at the Sydney Go meetup. Go is increasingly being used at Bigcommerce, especially within the Data team, and I'd like to outline with some examples why we like and use Go. First, check out the slides [https://docs.