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All posts in Product & Dev

How we changed the way we style our UI

In the last couple of years we’ve been improving the way we do UI development at Unbounce. We started by hiring people specifically dedicated to champion UI development who we’ve embedded in each squad, and we’re constantly looking at ways to improve our workflow. A couple of months ago, we also started using React. And with this came a new opportunity to redefine the way we’re styling our interface at Read More...

On growth, accountability, and capacity planning

There’s lots going on here at Unbounce as we grow. This month we welcome seven new Unbouncers, bringing our total head count to 135, and I’m sure Sascha and Charm are sweating just a little bit as they look at our head count projections for this year, and try to handicap when to bring on additional space. The other thing that happened this week is that we somewhat narrowly avoided Read More...

iPhone iOS 9 Redirect Caching Bug?

Recently, while I was investigating reports from a customer of 404 errors from our site, I found what I believe is an iOS 9.0 – 9.0.2 bug that I haven’t seen any reports of elsewhere.  Given this, I thought I’d share a bit of a write-up about what I found.

Transitioning to Software Development

One of Unbounce’s core values is courage. We want this value to be manifested across the board, including in how our teams evolve. Very often, companies are stuck in an organizational status quo for fear of what could happen if people would start moving between teams or, even scarier, between roles. But not us! We’re convinced that if you’re awesome in one place, there’s a great chance you’ll be awesome Read More...

Publishing assets: Sequential vs Parallel

A few days ago, we quietly deployed a change that nearly doubled publishing speed for the vast majority of Unbounce pages. Our publishing process involves two main steps: Render the page, and publish it to S3 Find all the assets referenced by the page, and publish them to S3 (where they are served by Cloudfront) The second step can only be done after the first step is done, because it Read More...

What The Page Builder Team Learned From Our First Fire Drill

We’ve started running “product fire drills” at Unbounce to help us react better as a team when things go wrong (as they do from time to time when you build products). On July 7th, we held our first such drill and, thought it would be a great idea to share our experience and learning points. First, I’d like to go over how we planned to set this up. After each sprint Read More...

Better logging of startup failures

Something is going to break Failures happen. Especially in complex systems with lots of dependencies. We try our best to design our systems with that in mind. We run a lot of short lived instances on AWS, and when something goes wrong those instance can be very short lived. If a new instance fails to startup correctly due to a transient failure outside the instance, or something broken with a code deployment. AWS auto-scaling terminates the instance Read More...

Making CSS Fit at Unbounce

Remember those days when we stuffed our faces with whatever could be found in mom’s cupboards with no repercussions? We were so young and our poor bodies could handle whatever we threw at it: pizza pops, a tray of oreos, bowl of chips, half of pan of rice krispie squares, loads and loads of css declarations. We were a mess, but did whatever it took to fill us up as Read More...

Our curvy road to Clojure

The Clojure language is spreading like wildfire at Unbounce. We just had three people attending Clojure West and being indoctrinated with the latest and greatest news about this language and its ecosystem. So we’re very serious about it! But this commitment didn’t happen overnight: it took us a while and some experiments (at times painful) to come to the conclusion that Clojure was the right tool for us.

True Zero Downtime HAProxy Reloads: An Alternative Approach

Recently, this blog post circulated around the tech Twittersphere: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/04/true-zero-downtime-haproxy-reloads.html It’s an excellent write-up from Yelp about how to get truly zero downtime from HAProxy, which I recommend reading.  It’ll work for a lot of scenarios, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work for the one we experience at Unbounce.