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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

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

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

Big Growth in Austin

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.

GoSF Meetup at Bigcommerce

Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting the GoSF meetup [http://www.meetup.com/golangsf/events/221271422/] in our San Francisco office. The attendance was great (over 100 people) and we were able to listen to three awesome speakers. By the way, we love hosting tech meetups in our

Joining an engineering team

It’s 8:47pm and you still haven’t been outside today. Your last meal, which you ate at your desk, was toast… with an egg. You haven’t had a chance to go grocery shopping in a couple of days. You’ll have that time once you finally get

Plotting with Dots

Most system monitoring tools and load test tools output line graphs, where data values are averaged per second or per minute, and the resulting set of averages is then plotted joined with lines. In doing this averaging and connecting with lines, important information is lost , along with lots of interesting

Max Levchin on Entrepreneurship

One week after Bigcommerce and PayPal announced [https://twitter.com/PayPal4Business/status/601509383046963200] a strategic partnership, we were fortunate to host Max Levchin in our SF office. Max was one of the original cofounders of PayPal where he served as the CTO until its acquisition by Ebay in 2002. In

Rewriting our Ruby API Client

Having recently joined Bigcommerce in San Francisco, I wanted to get up to speed quickly on the API and development process. When I was given then opportunity to work on rewriting our Ruby API Client, I jumped at the chance, knowing it would serve me well to learn the ins

PHP Memory Optimization

Lately, I’ve been working on optimizing the memory of some of our backend PHP applications and wanted to share some of the tricks that I have come across, especially dealing with large set of data using PHP. Always cap your internal in-memory caching In day to day PHP coding,

Recovering Redis Data with GDB

We recently had an incident where we had a Redis [http://redis.io/] instance blocked on writing to disk, hung inside the kernel. Through a variety of other circumstances this meant the only up to date copy of business critical data was in memory on a single machine, multiple independent

How we use Elasticsearch

At Bigcommerce, we’ve recently migrated our search infrastructure from MySQL full-text indices to Elasticsearch [https://www.elastic.co/]. Running searches using MySQL full-text indices would take a long time on large stores and occasionally cause web requests to time out. Because full-text indices aren’t scalable, we saw instances

Design+Performance @ Bigcommerce San Francisco

This week we had the honor of hosting the creator of YSlow and HTTP Archive, former Head Performance Engineer at Google, and overall performance Boss -Steve Souders [https://twitter.com/Souders]to speak onDesign + Performance [https://www.stevesouders.com/docs/d+p-fluent-20150422.key]. He opened by talking about the gap

Web Accessibility

What comes to mind when you think of a disability? For many of us, the image of a disabled person parking placard with a wheelchair comes to mind. In reality, disabilities cover more than a person with an externally obvious physical impairment. Hearing loss, disorders of fine motor skills and