A brief story of how open-source software helped us to reduce 10 times our payload and scale image serving at heycar

A little bit of context

The basic infrastructure at heycar was built in 6 weeks. Of course, at that time it was a very raw platform, despite that was a huge achievement.

Our core differentiation is the quality of what we offer. Therefore, we all have to keep an eye on the User Experience. With that in mind, one of the first things I’ve noticed when I joined the company was the huge payload of the search results page mostly given by our images.

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We still live in an era where most of the computer behavior is dictated by human generated code.

One of biggest errors one can make is to assume that such code is bullet proof based of the myths that people take for granted e.g.: works on my machine, it has 100% test coverage, and such.

is it still working?

A report of a 5+ years experience as team member

Being part of a development team can be a hard task sometimes, mostly because of requirements changes, pressure, and deadlines. There are several actions that can be taken to manage the different impacts of the challenges in this dangerous environment.

After 5+ years working with small to large development teams, I was able to identify some fundamentals or cornerstones that can help your team on thriving the challenges and reaching productivity by respecting some simple principles.

It is important to highlight that this content is not stone rock writing, meaning…

> DISCLAIMER: This article was created several years ago, it’s not the most up to date reference for such content

If you code for the web, you probably work with databases, which leads you to integrate, setup and most importantly understand how a database works.

Let us say at some point your project starts to draw attention, many users connecting and consuming data at the same time. You will have to scale!

One of the secrets behind a scalable architecture for a web application relies on knowing which database to use as well when and how to use them. …

Every quarter at Globo.com, the whole company stops to promote a “Hackday”. Basically, 24 hours that we can free our minds from daily problems and code that cool idea we had on that beautiful Monday afternoon.

This quarter we created a POC (proof of concept) of a recommendation system based on dynamic attributes of videos.

We’re not big data boys

Understanding simple, but yet abstract concepts behind user interactions with our systems, allowed us to identify something obvious:

It is very hard to provide good video recommendation content!

Who would have guessed, right? It’s obvious. There are people all around the world studying ways to…

Behind every worldwide event there is always a new invention providing the means so the human kind can change the course of the nature as they like.

Not any different, multiplexed systems had a very special role in the human history. Most of the times unnoticed by the untrained eye, multiplexing has become something extremely important to the evolution of our communication systems all around the world.

First of all, it is important to get the context behind the need of it.

It all started with the telegraph, the first technology that provided fast communication across large distances almost instantly.

The constant growth of technology creates a huge demand for business oriented programmers to support corporate software. This demand and the potential of good salaries frequently influence a lot of people to change the course of their careers in order to become software developers.

Do all of these developers need to know about math in order to code?

A short answer to this question would be a simple YES, but the next question certainly would be “Why?” and that answer it is not a simple one.

YO, Science!

Most of the computer science or engineering undergrads have a math background, fact, but…