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Starting out with data puddles, then we’ll think about data lakes

Starting out with data puddles, then we’ll think about data lakes

Comic Relief is re-thinking its data ingestion, storage and query stack with Lambda, S3 & Athena. Here is a quick intro to how we are…
Go to the profile of Adam Clark
Adam Clark
Migrating from a conventional CMS to a decoupled technology stack!

Migrating from a conventional CMS to a decoupled technology stack!

How we migrated the main Comic Relief site over a 5 month period from Drupal 8 to a headless CMS and a more modern software stack (aka…
Go to the profile of Gus Liedke
Gus Liedke
Bringing our Comic Relief Values to life with IoT and Serverless

Bringing our Comic Relief Values to life with IoT and Serverless

Seven values, from “Break down Barriers”, to “Have a sense of humour, always”, together with a wish from our director Charlotte to bring…
Go to the profile of Peter Vanhee
Peter Vanhee
How we made our Serverless payments platform CMS driven

How we made our Serverless payments platform CMS driven

A deep dive into how we made our payments platform CMS driven while maintaining the ability to happily scale to 300 donations per second
Go to the profile of Adam Clark
Adam Clark
Data Philanthropy: My experience at Nectar’s Data Swarm Event

Data Philanthropy: My experience at Nectar’s Data Swarm Event

Of the many ways to support charities and the causes we believe in, financial donation is both the most straightforward and the most…
Go to the profile of Florence Hope
Florence Hope
The real business value Comic Relief has unlocked by going Serverless

The real business value Comic Relief has unlocked by going Serverless

Moving the majority of our user-facing tech to Serverless has led to some incredible cost savings, but that’s not where the real business…
Go to the profile of Caroline Rennie
Caroline Rennie
AWS Summit London case study: Going Serverless at Comic Relief

AWS Summit London case study: Going Serverless at Comic Relief

AWS Summit Serverless deep dive, led by Danilo Poccia, followed by the Comic Relief case study.
Go to the profile of Caroline Rennie
Caroline Rennie
Monitoring & Debugging Serverless Applications for Red Nose Day 2019

Monitoring & Debugging Serverless Applications for Red Nose Day 2019

How we debug, the methodology and the tools that we use to debug our Serverless infrastructure.
Go to the profile of Adam Clark
Adam Clark
Load testing Serverless with Serverless at Comic Relief

Load testing Serverless with Serverless at Comic Relief

How we load test our Serverless applications (and legacy applications) using Serverless Artillery in the lead up to Red Nose Day 2019
Go to the profile of Adam Clark
Adam Clark
The Journey to 90% Serverless at Comic Relief

The Journey to 90% Serverless at Comic Relief

The 90% figure is plucked out of thin air — it’s just me trying to pick a really big number without accurately calculating a percentage
Go to the profile of Adam Clark
Adam Clark
Pipelines everywhere

Pipelines everywhere

Continuously delivering software to production systems is a key part of building great digital products and creating a culture of agility…
Go to the profile of Peter Vanhee
Peter Vanhee
Our takeaways from AWS re:Invent

Our takeaways from AWS re:Invent

Although AWS re:Invent 2018 is now over, the announcements will have a wide-ranging effect on how we build our products over the coming…
Go to the profile of Adam Clark
Adam Clark
Proving the concept: Avoiding the hack day prototype graveyard

Proving the concept: Avoiding the hack day prototype graveyard

Back in February, we held a hack day which led to this post on practical tips for organising one. One of the problems we tried to find a…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Serverless at Comic Relief

Serverless at Comic Relief

It has been over a year since we first embarked on our serverless journey at Comic Relief, and our functions have been happily running in…
Go to the profile of Peter Vanhee
Peter Vanhee
Organising productive hackdays — how to make the most of your hackathons

Organising productive hackdays — how to make the most of your hacka...

Some t
Go to the profile of Caroline Rennie
Caroline Rennie
Accessibility: Access All Areas

Accessibility: Access All Areas

Accessible digital experiences are something we strive for at Comic Relief — we’re not perfect at it, but we’re trying to make sure that…
Go to the profile of Caroline Rennie
Caroline Rennie
Waste not, want not: Upcycle your tech!

Waste not, want not: Upcycle your tech!

Working in the charity sector you learn to be pretty resourceful when you need to be, and that doesn’t stop at blagging free stuff…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Our approach on ‘Automated’ regression testing

Our approach on ‘Automated’ regression testing

Recently we reviewed our current approach for automated regression testing for one of our products here at Comic Relief. In this post I…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
How ‘Going Live’ became my mental blocker

How ‘Going Live’ became my mental blocker

For the past four months, the Platform Squad at Comic Relief has been working on a content migration from the old Drupal 7 code base to…
Go to the profile of Caroline Rennie
Caroline Rennie
Pattern Lab — the beauty of a shared styling library

Pattern Lab — the beauty of a shared styling library

For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Pattern-Lab (or a Pattern Library), it’s essentially a living style guide; a common tool…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Why we made our platform product open-source

Why we made our platform product open-source

Over the last year a key objective for the Technology team at Comic Relief has been to build products not websites. Tech Lead, Peter…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Drupal 8 and Composer can be friends

Drupal 8 and Composer can be friends

10 years ago (at the end of 2006), Drush appeared to make it easy for Drupal developers to do some common tasks, it wasn’t immediately…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Drupalcon Baltimore talk & slides

Drupalcon Baltimore talk & slides

Two weeks ago, I presented our story of rebuilding rednoseday.com on Drupal 8 at DrupalCon Baltimore, Drupal’s largest gathering with an…
Go to the profile of Peter Vanhee
Peter Vanhee
The Power of Digital Storytelling — Part 1

The Power of Digital Storytelling — Part 1

Hey, I’m Leigh. I’m a digital designer at Comic Relief and this is my first post for the Comic Relief Tech Blog! I’ve just started working…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
From Drupal 7 to standard PHP development

From Drupal 7 to standard PHP development

In the past we used a Drupal 7 multi-site powering at least 3 different sites at the same time with all our business logic bundled inside…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Our first Redis Nose Day

Our first Redis Nose Day

We changed a few of the services that support our apps for Red Nose Day giving pages before the big day this year.
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Women in tech at Comic Relief

Women in tech at Comic Relief

‘A lack of women in technology jobs is not just a problem for women, it’s a problem for the whole sector.’
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Digital storytelling: The next generation

Digital storytelling: The next generation

Kids are my favourite kind of user. I haven’t yet met a user with more honest feedback than a pre-teen. And there’s no shortage of it…
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
Top tips for writing for the web

Top tips for writing for the web

Structure makes all the difference when it comes to making digital content engaging. Nobody wants to be hit with a giant wall of text.
Go to the profile of Comic Relief Engineering
Comic Relief Engineering
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