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Published in FT Product & Technology

·Sep 16, 2019

Supporting our systems through incident workshops

How we are recreating old incidents to ensure our engineers are prepared for the unexpected — Within the Customer Products group at the FT (we work on FT.com and the FT mobile apps) we’ve faced an interesting situation this year, something for us to be proud of. …

Engineering

4 min read

Supporting our systems through incident workshops
Supporting our systems through incident workshops

Apr 20, 2018

Winter Bushcraft in Finland’s Boreal Forest

Photos from a cold adventure with Ray Mears. — This April I spent ten days away in Finland, on a course run by Woodlore that taught us the skills needed to travel Earth’s Taiga biome. The Taiga, also known as the Boreal Forest, spans the Northern Hemisphere and is the second largest biome on Earth. …

Travel

3 min read

Winter Bushcraft in Finland’s Boreal Forest
Winter Bushcraft in Finland’s Boreal Forest

Published in FT Product & Technology

·Mar 5, 2018

HTTP Strict Transport Security for FT.com

Our road to enabling HSTS, inspired by the Yelp story. — Since October 2016, when we launched the new site, FT.com has only been available over https://. However, we still have many insecure links pointing to our site, leaving users at risk from session hijacking and protocol downgrade attacks. Over the past few months we’ve implemented the HTTP Strict Transport Security…

Security

3 min read

HTTP Strict Transport Security for FT.com
HTTP Strict Transport Security for FT.com

Published in FT Product & Technology

·Nov 24, 2017

What happens when you visit FT.com?

Making a request to the Financial Times. — This is an overview of how the Financial Times serves requests to www.ft.com. Starting with our domains, going all the way down to our Heroku applications, and through everything in between. Table of Contents Domain Name System Content Delivery Network Preflight Router Service Registry Applications Elasticsearch The End Result Domain Name System (DNS)

Technology

11 min read

What happens when you visit FT.com?
What happens when you visit FT.com?

Nov 16, 2017

Brotli Compression

What is Brotli, and why should I care? — Brotli is a new-ish lossless compression algorithm developed by Google. Brotli was initially developed to decrease the size of transmissions of WOFF2 web fonts, and in that context was a continuation of the development of zopfli, which is a zlib-compatible implementation of the standard gzip and deflate specifications. So it’s…

Compression

2 min read

Brotli Compression
Brotli Compression

Sep 1, 2017

Redirects at the Edge

Serverless redirects for legacy domains using Fastly, Terraform, and CircleCI. — Previously at the Financial Times we’ve made use of the Dyn HTTP redirect service to send traffic from domains and subdomains to www.ft.com, which has been working just fine for our legacy domains that never used TLS. However, there has been a number of recent tasks to redirect subdomains with…

Fastly

6 min read

Redirects at the Edge
Redirects at the Edge

Aug 31, 2017

Query Fastly Logs using Amazon Athena

Serverless log file analysis with web scale. — What is Fastly? Fastly is a content delivery network, powered by the Varnish HTTP Cache. It enables the Financial Times to deliver www.ft.com globally in under a second. What is Amazon Athena? Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Which means, for a practical…

AWS

4 min read

Query Fastly Logs using Amazon Athena
Query Fastly Logs using Amazon Athena
Samuel Parkinson

Samuel Parkinson

Principal Engineer at the Financial Times.

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