Written by Remi Carton About two years ago it became apparent that our frontend architecture was showing its limits. We dreaded adding new features because of side-effect bugs. Changing a dropdown could break unrelated parts of the UI. …

Written by Carlos Monroy Nieblas Garbage Collection can take a big toll on any Java application, so it’s important to understand its behavior and impact. After a JVM upgrade of Knewton’s Cassandra database, we needed a tool to compare the performance and impact of different garbage collection strategies, but we couldn’t find an existing tool that would parse gc logs and analyze them. This post explains the process followed and discusses some results that we believe may be useful while evaluating Java garbage collection strategies.

Written by Seth Charlip-Blumlein Photo by Michael VH via Flickr (CC BY 2.0) Introduction So you’ve built an important new service. It satisfies current use cases and is also forward looking. Pretty soon it’s mission-critical, so you optimize where you can and keep it humming along. Then the product changes, and…

Written by Josh Wickman As discussed previously, Knewton has a large Cassandra deployment to meet its data store needs. Despite best efforts to standardize configurations across the deployment, the systems are in a near-constant flux. …

Written by Jeff Berger Everyone who works in tech has had to debug a problem. Hopefully it is as simple as looking into a log file, but many times it is not. Sometimes the problem goes away and sometimes it only looks like it goes away. Other times it might…

Written by Jemma Issroff Why Build a Client Library? As part of Knewton’s mission to personalize learning for everyone, Knewton strives to provide an easy-to-use API that our partners can leverage in order to experience the power of adaptive learning. …

Written by John Thornton The team is in agreement: the Flimflamulator service is a mess of tech debt and something needs to be done. Other software teams at the company write code that depends on this service, however. They’ve built workarounds, and any changes will propagate into their systems. …

Written by Paul Sastrasinh, Robert Murcek The Knewton API gives students and teachers access to personalized learning recommendations and analytics in real time. In this post, we will pull back the covers of our API to explain how we handle user requests. You will first learn how to build an…

Written by Prithvi Raj Previous blog posts have explained Knewton’s motivation for implementing distributed tracing, and the architecture we put together for it. At Knewton, the major consumers of tracing are ~80 engineers working on ~50 services. A team consisting of three engineers handled designing and deploying the tracing infrastructure…