Invoca Engineering Blog

Ruby Constants with Rails (and How to Avoid the “already initialized constant X” Warning)

Our New Performance Score for Signal AI

We came up with a formula that shows the accuracy and…

Our Journey To Continuous Deployment

This is the chronicle of a multi-year odyssey of transforming a 40 person development team and…

Challenges of organizing and hosting a CTF

We just wrapped up the 2018 Santa Barbara Capture The Flag and it was another…

Zero Downtime Schema Migrations

As part of our Journey to Continuous Deployment at Invoca, one of the roadblocks to more frequent and flexible deploys was database schema migrations. We had to lock users out during a deploys that contained migrations because when users read or wrote to tables that were…

MySQL storage of UTF-8 characters

While reviewing a recent pull request, I realized I didn’t fully understand how MySQL stores UTF-8 characters. It is especially confusing due to inconsistencies with the family of text column types (TINYTEXT, TEXT…) that we use for aggregate storage (such as JSON blobs)…