TL&DR; Last Friday, the response time for serving pages to Europe-based visitors climbed to unacceptable levels (15 seconds per page or even more), forcing us to temporarily redirect all European traffic to our page serving infrastructure in the US East Coast. A combination of elevated response time from S3 and illegitimate traffic hitting our pages made an implementation weakness in our page server surface and, eventually, lead to this perfect Read More...
A few months ago our UX team made the decision to begin implementing usability studies and user interviews into our design process. Even after 5 years in the game this isn’t a huge deal considering Unbounce already has a pretty close connection with it’s customers (our Customer Success team rocks). To ensure we are building what our users want, we take feature requests into account to plan out our product roadmap. Read More...
Over 3 months ago I posted a screencast of the prototype we were working on for Responsive, mobile-ready pages in Unbounce. Being our number one requested feature this year, it got a lot of attention and I promised an update as we progressed. Well, I’m excited (like, reeeeally excited) to announce that as of yesterday morning we have officially rolled into an “Alpha” testing stage with a handful of customers building real Read More...
In September 2013, the Reactive Manifesto was published and, quickly, software developers around the world started to add their signatures to endorse it. Unsurprisingly we all want to build better software, that is applications that behave gracefully when things are normal and also when the fan gets hit. The four main principles listed in the manifesto (represented in the diagram below) are not new but they are conveniently bound together Read More...
This is a pretty exciting week to be a software developer in Vancouver: meet-ups and conferences are blooming! It is a great time for stuffing your brain and learn or rediscover the principles of good software design and architecture. Whatever language or platform you’re using, the same constraints apply (like the speed of light!) thus the best practices apply too. As an appetizer for this week of software madness, we’ve Read More...
Last Friday saw our inaugural ShipIt day at Unbounce. Modelled on the concept popularized by Atlassian, the intent of the day was to work on problems not necessarily on our current schedule and demo where we get to at the end of the day. The purpose was to have the opportunity to try something different, to spark creative thinking and perhaps even have some fun. It seemed pretty simple in theory. Meet Read More...
A big part of what we do here at Unbounce is all about removing the pain of dealing with technology hassles from the daily lives of marketers. Things should Just Work™, and as an Unbounce customer you should be delighted to discover new and wonderful capabilities that magically appear for you. Today is one of those delightful moments when we get to launch a truly significant improvement to the Unbounce Read More...
At Unbounce we love open source technologies. We build our awesome stuff on them and we contribute back as well. Knowing that a typical open source library itself depends on a bunch of other libraries, our applications end up being built on trees of dependencies. This could be a daunting thought: how can we build confidence that this doesn’t turn into a house of cards? I’m going to detail our Read More...
I have used the asset pipeline heavily since its release in Rails 3.1.0 over two years ago. Only recently did I run in to a handful of gotchas when it came to dealing with stylesheet compilations using Sass. The asset pipeline had been used mostly for compilation and minification of coffeescript. Not much time was spent on the stylesheet-side development. Depending on the service we may have used Sass or Read More...
It’s no secret that Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a big deal when it comes to handling the growing number of devices accessing the web these days. Ever since Ethan Marcotte wrote this article coining the term, it’s been getting more and more attention in the design community. Almost exactly a year ago, Google announced they were “upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns,” changing the way marketers were able to Read More...