Bazaarvoice

Can You Keep a Secret?

We all have secrets. Sometimes, these are guilty pleasures that we try to keep hidden, like watching cheesy reality TV or indulging in strange comfort food. We often worry:

How We Scale to 16+ Billion Calls

The holiday season brings a huge spike in traffic for many companies. While increased traffic is great for retail business, it also puts infrastructure reliability to the test. At times when every second of uptime is of elevated importance, how can engineering teams ensure zero downtime and performant applications? Here are some key strategies and considerations we employ at Bazaarvoice as we prepare our platform to handle over 16 Billion API calls during Cyber Week.

Flyte 1 Year In

On the racetrack of building ML applications, traditional software development steps are often overtaken. Welcome to the world of MLOps, where unique challenges meet innovative solutions and consistency is king. 

What was Old is New: Finding Joy in Modernising Legacy Systems

Let’s face it: software is easier to write than maintain. This is why we, as software engineers, prefer to just “rip it out and start over” instead of trying to understand what another developer (or our past self) was thinking. We seem to have collectively forgotten that “programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute”. You know it’s true — we’ve all had to painstakingly trace through a casserole of spaghetti code and thin, old-world-style abstractions digging for the meat of the program only to find nothing but a mess at the bottom of our plates.

What’s Old is New: Finding Joy in Modernizing Legacy Systems

Let’s face it: software is easier to write than maintain. This is why we, as software engineers, prefer to just “rip it out and start over” instead of trying to understand what another developer (or our past self) was thinking. We seem to have collectively forgotten that “programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute”. You know it’s true — we’ve all had to painstakingly trace through a casserole of spaghetti code and thin, old-world-style abstractions digging for the meat of the program only to find nothing but a mess at the bottom of our plates.

Kedro 6 Months In

We build AI software in two modes: experimentation and productization. During experimentation, we are trying to see if modern technology will solve our problem. If it does, we move on to productization and build reliable data pipelines at scale.

Root Cause Analysis for Hadoop Applications

One of the reasons why Hadoop jobs are hard to operate is their inability to provide clear, actionable error diagnostic messages for users. This stems from the fact that Hadoop consists of many interrelated components. When a component fails or behaves poorly, the failure will be cascaded to its dependent components which causes a job to fail.

Hackathon 2019

This year’s Bazzarvoice Hackathon coincided with our annual all hands meeting in Austin. Our global offices took time to work on projects that focused on innovation, social integrations, and improved efficiencies. Teams across our departments participated This included: R&D, Product, Customer Services, and Knowledge Base.

Response API Demo App

Are you looking to develop your own application on top of the Bazaarvoice Response API? Well, we got something for you. The Response API Demo App is a simple Node-React application which demonstrates how to use Response API in conjunction with our 3-legged OAuth2 API. It is recommended to go through the Developer Portal and read about OAuth2 API and the Response API before diving into the application architecture below.

Vger Lets You Boldly Go . . .

Are you working on an agile team? Odds are high that you probably are. Whether you do Scrum/Kanban/lean/extreme, you are all about getting work done with the least resistance possible. Heck, if you are still on Waterfall, you care about that.  But how well are you doing? Do you know? Is that something a developer or a lead should even worry about or is a SEP? That’s a trick question. If your team is being held accountable and there is a gap between their expectations and your delivery, by the transitive property, you should worry about some basic lean metrics.

Still Looking Good While Testing: Automated Testing With a Visual Regression Service Part II

If you’ve followed our blog regularly, you’ve probably read our post on using visual regression testing tools and services to better test your applications’ front end look and feel.  If not, take a few minutes to read through our previous post on this topic.

Looking Good While Testing: Automated Testing With a Visual Regression Service

A lot of (virtual) ink has been spilled on this blog about automated testing (no, really). This post is another in a series of dives into different automated testing tools and how you can use them to deliver a better, higher-quality web application.

Auditing your Web App for Accessibility with Lighthouse

If you’ve followed our blog for some time, you’ve likely encountered posts detailing how to engage in various kinds of software testing, from performance to data-driven to security and more.

Getting Started with Dependency Security and NodeJS

Internet security is a topic that receives more attention every day.  If you’re reading this article in early 2018, issues like Meltdown, Specter and the Equifax breach are no doubt fresh in your mind.

Creating a Realtime Reactive App for a collaborative domain

Sampling is a Bazaarvoice product that allows consumers to join communities and claim a limited amount of free products. In return consumers provide honest & authentic product reviews for the products they sample. Products are released to consumers for reviews at the same time. This causes a rush to claim these products. This is an example of a collaborative domain problem, where many users are trying to act on the same data (as discussed in Eric Evens book Domain-Driven design).

Event Stream Modeling

Recently, during a holiday lull, I decided to look at another way of modeling event stream data (for the purposes of anomaly detection).