Introduction to the Engineers at Sea Blog
Welcome to the Engineers at Sea Blog! We’re stoked that you’re here and interested in what we have to say. Our blog is the result of manifold desires, two of which serve as our foundation:
- To give back to the engineering community. No engineer pursues their task alone, and we have all benefited greatly from the various articles, forums, and documentation produced by those engineers who have come before us. We now wish to be active contributors to the larger conversation, and we hope that we are able to help others as we have been helped.
- We want to show off some of the unique challenges that we face daily, and give people a sense of what it’s like to work on our team.
A little background on us — Mediaocean is helping marketers meet the changing desires of consumers by marketing the way that consumers consume: cross platform, and integrated. Our Scope product is the leading self-service intelligence platform for marketers to drive business outcomes across closed ecosystems. Some of the challenges we face include:
- How can we improve our UI/UX to increase user engagement?
- Maintaining performance.
- Frontend: we surface thousands of entities in our UI and want to ensure smooth and speedy performance for our users.
- Backend: we have a lot of data that has to be efficiently ingested, queried, transformed, and aggregated. We have to be able to perform operations as efficiently as possible on massive data sets.
- We consume a lot of data from various sources, and we want to make it as accessible as possible (Extract, Transform, Load x 1000).
- External API integrations.
- Automation: Allowing clients to create optimizations based on rules and different conditions, and managing complexity while maintaining simplicity for the user.
- Labels: Allowing clients to tag different entities for organization. (It sounds simple but there is a lot that goes into it).
- Increasing test coverage. You can never have enough testing.
Our authors have the freedom to choose whatever subject they want to write about, so you can be sure that our posts come from a place of interest. In all likelihood there were a lot of hours spent Googling, StackOverflowing, and *bang-head-in-to-wall*-ing by our team as they learned these concepts for themselves and discovered how to implement them (probably by trial and error, because is there really any other way to learn stuff as a dev?). It is now our task to take those hours and experiences, and help make the path a little bit smoother for you than it was for us.
While there may be the occasional “Intro to ____” post, we generally aim to discuss a specific issue or topic, and how we addressed it in our own work. For example, an article on “Why we switched to a service-based architecture” would a) identify the problem we had; b) explain the solution we implemented; and c) explain the reason/rationale behind our decision.
Our aim is for the read time to be between five and twenty minutes: perfect for reading during a coffee break. We’ll include meaningful code snippets to clarify our explanations and provide examples. We hope to be able to provide a fuller picture and explanation of each topic, rather than a cursory glance.
Lastly, thank you for being interested in what we have to say. We hope you find our posts helpful and informative — and if you don’t, tell us in the comments! (Also tell us if you love it and it’s your favorite technical post of all time. Really just any comments are welcomed.) Now that I’ve successfully violated the above guidelines and written an “Intro to ___” post with a three minute read time (no one’s perfect), here’s to launching our blog and contributing to the conversation!
Gareth Leake
Software Development Engineer and also De facto editor guy
On Twitter: @gareth_leake_
