API Infrastructure at Knewton: What’s in an Edge Service?

Written by Paul Sastrasinh, Robert Murcek

The Knewton API gives students and teachers access to personalized learning recommendations and analytics in real time. In this post, we will pull back the covers…

Analyzing Java “Garbage First Garbage Collection” (G1GC) Logs

Written by Carlos Monroy Nieblas

Garbage Collection can take a big toll on any Java application, so it’s important to understand its…

System Design Documents at Knewton: RFCs

Written by John Thornton

The team is in agreement: the Flimflamulator service is a mess of tech debt and something needs to be done. Other software teams at the company write code that depends on this service, however. They’ve built…

Digging Deep Into Cassandra Thrift Buffer Behavior

Written by Jeff Berger

Everyone who works in tech has had to debug a problem. Hopefully it is as simple as looking into a log file, but many times it is not. Sometimes the problem goes away and sometimes it only…

Redux at Knewton

Written by Remi Carton

About two years ago it became apparent that our frontend architecture was showing its limits. We dreaded adding new features because of side-effect bugs. Changing a dropdown could break unrelated parts of the UI. These issues occurred mostly because…

Distributed Tracing: Motivation

Written by Sarah Haskins

Knewton’s technology solutions comprise more than 50 different services. Such a complex system can be difficult to debug, which is why we set out to integrate distributed tracing into our architecture. A distributed tracing…

How to Replace a Microservice: Swapping Out the Engine in Mid-Flight

Written by Seth Charlip-Blumlein