Marketplacer and its websites served user-provided web-optimised images from the same webserver as its actual application, and stored both the original image and the web-optimised versions on disk. Each image’s filename was…

This post describes the structured logging setup used at Marketplacer to publish information about each request to our Rails application to our ELK stack.

Our primary goal for our ELK platform was forensics & long term usage analysis of…

As a developer, designer or other direct contributor to the product creation process, there’s a single principle that drives morale, productivity and motivation:

I feel that I am effectively working on something I find interesting and meaningful in a…

Our full-system integration tests take too long to run: between five and eight minutes in a highly optimised CI environment, and over an hour if run on a developer’s laptop.

I’ve traditionally thought of myself as a backend developer: my career, before management, was in Java, C, Perl, Python and Ruby. I admit to scoffing at the idea of Javascript as a “real” language as late as 2011, even though some amazing work was being done…