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Comic Relief Technology

The home of the Comic Relief Technology team, where we showcase the way we use technology to support the core aims of our organisation and a bit about how we do it.

  • Engineering
  • Product Development
  • Serverless
  • The Team
  • UX & Design
  • Comic Relief Github
  • 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
    Jan 31, 2020
    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 Gustavo Liedke
    Gustavo Liedke
    Jan 28, 2020
    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
    Dec 6, 2019
    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
    Jul 29, 2019
    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
    Jul 22, 2019
    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
    Jul 9, 2019
    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
    Jun 6, 2019
    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
    Mar 28, 2019
    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
    Mar 25, 2019
    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
    Mar 21, 2019
    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
    Jan 31, 2019
    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
    Dec 4, 2018
    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
    Jul 31, 2018
    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
    Jul 12, 2018
    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
    Mar 8, 2018
    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
    Jan 17, 2018
    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
    Oct 2, 2017
    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
    Aug 21, 2017
    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
    Aug 7, 2017
    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
    Jul 17, 2017
    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
    Jul 6, 2017
    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
    May 17, 2017
    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
    May 14, 2017
    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
    Apr 27, 2017
    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
    Apr 5, 2017
    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
    Apr 3, 2017
    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
    Mar 8, 2017
    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
    Mar 6, 2017
    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
    Feb 8, 2017
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