Simple image placeholders for lazy loading images

Here at Casper, we’ve been working on our front-end performance, primarily focusing on reducing start render time and overall load time. A big factor that affects front-end performance is the amount of documents and assets being loaded on a web…

Processing Email Attachments with AWS

Over the past several months, the Casper team has worked on pulling data managed by third parties into our AWS-based data infrastructure. While we have been fortunate to partner with many organizations who are able to provide an API or work with our SFTP server…

How we shaved 1.7 seconds off casper.com by self-hosting Optimizely

How Casper’s Tech team plans a full quarter of software releases

Implementing AMQP in an Elixir Application

Here at Casper, we use a service-oriented architecture to separate concerns around placing orders, fulfilling orders, and sending transactional notifications. Much of this system relies on AMQP (specifically RabbitMQ) as the protocol for communication…

RFCs: Lightweight Technical Designs

Major software development projects at Casper merit Technical…

Securing WebSockets in Elixir

At Casper, we’re always evaluating emerging technologies to use in new projects and systems as they arise. We recently completed a project to streamline real-time communication with our customers, complementing our award winning Customer Experience team. The project required…

Postgres json column + Rails @ Casper

As part of an engineering team that has been using a json column in production for two years, things can sometimes feel a bit lonely. Googling around for blog posts about the json column, you’ll find a fair number of discussions of the feature on a theoretical…

FactoryGirl associations without callbacks

FactoryGirl is a way to generate objects via a common interface and language. More specifically, it is for generating ActiveRecord objects and saving them to the DB. By using FactoryGirl you can easily abstract the creation of large records behind a short…