commercetools

How we evaluated the impact of GitHub Copilot for 3 months

GitHub announced its launch of GitHub Copilot for Business in February of this year. This announcement immediately caught our attention and…

3 years of sustaining Open Source through our donation program

Throughout the last three years, we have continuously supported Open Source projects through an initiative we call the Open Source donation…

A systematic approach to organizing yourself with Obsidian

In our industry, deep focus work is of major importance. For me, with limited brain capacity available, I realized early on that having as few things in my head as possible allows the most focus on…

Why we need Staff Product Managers

Our product and development teams here at commercetools have doubled in size over the last year, and we plan to continue to grow. This growth means that new product domains and a multi-level org…

Veni, vidi, vici: my journey into mastering remote working

I have been working at commercetools as a Software Engineer for more than five years now. Even before the pandemic, commercetools has always been a remote and home office friendly employer. We always…

Product & Tech — Better Together!

The one big challenge in product development is that there are always so many ideas and so little time! Or so they say. The far bigger challenge is that we’re all humans, with our own ambitions…

Scaling our Frontend architecture with our team's growth

Over the last several years the commercetools team and product witnessed an exponential growth that required organisational changes as well as a strong technical foundation to accompany the current…

The heat is on: My learnings from our Engineering offsite

At the beginning of 2020, I organized an offsite for 15 Scala Engineers. A few weeks later, our CEO asked everyone to temporarily work from home. Many teams were already distributed across two…

Staff and Principal Engineers: why do we need them now? (Part 2)

We are an established scale-up with a well-known product and a substantial customer base. We are still experiencing a heightened state of growth, meaning new product domains, org structures, and…

Staff and Principal Engineers: why do we need them now? (Part 1)

More than an answer, we have a story. More than a story, we have an evolution log of how we built our own Tech Leadership track, from the early stages of a ‘Tech Lead’ to the latest iteration within…

Integrating cryptocurrency, crypto payments and commercetools

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue to gain mainstream traction as a digital currency. This post outlines three methods of integrating cryptocurrency with your commercetools project. In the…

Here’s a present that you can unwrap for 2022: commercetools + AWS EventBridge

We here at commercetools have a gift for you — just in time for the holidays. With AWS EventBridge, there’s now a way to connect different event sources with AWS cloud services seamlessly. What does…

Applying UX copy techniques to name an API

At commercetools we love experimenting and trying out innovative ideas that let us get the best possible solution for our users. This time we used an existing framework for an unusual purpose: to…

Building an API for All Businesses

Building a flexible API requires a lot of thought and planning. Successfully building one that can work for multiple business segments may seem impossible, but it can be done. With varying employee…

How we Roadmap in 2021

One of the recurring tasks as Head of Product is coming up with quarterly roadmaps. Now that the fabulous product management team at commercetools and I have done this together six times, I feel like…

Bring your APIs from good to awesome with UX research!

When you hear about “UX research”, “user experience” or “user interface design”, the first things which might come to mind are “websites”, “user tools”, “software interfaces”, “intuitive…

Serverless commercetools Integration

commercetools API Extensions and Subscriptions allow you to customize and extend e-commerce functionality based on your company’s unique business needs. The Serverless Framework allows for fast and…

Testing JavaScript applications with confidence

It is undeniable that a lot has changed in the last few years in the world of JavaScript. This should not come as a surprise. We are particularly excited to see a lot of progress in the way we write…

Solving Organizational Issues like a Product Manager

At commercetools, we strive to have a working environment where everyone and every team feels, and is, valued/respected. To strive towards something also means that we’re never quite satisfied with…

How we created an effective, game-based team feedback framework

How we created an improvised, game-based team feedback framework in order to improve the team collaboration.

Adopting Changesets for release and changelog automation

When working on Open Source Software (OSS), documentation is a crucial part of the project. It helps to ease adoption by providing in-depth descriptions on how to get started, how to use advanced…

Easy steps to get OBS running for high-quality demo and presentation recordings

Earlier this year, the product team started conducting internal product update demos. Every other month, we would showcase the changes and new features from across the product team to the entire…

Migrating commerce Apple Watch App to GraphQL

In today’s constantly-connected era, we see many commerce avenues available across all existing platforms: from traditional websites and mobile apps that we’re used to, to voice assistants, IoT…

Five practical tips when using React hooks in production

We at commercetools were early adopters of React hooks and would like to share five tips of using hook sin production.

How we transformed the product search for the better

A UX case study of how we built our new search and filter solution for eCommerce product catalog managers, by following a user-centered design approach.

It’s done! Or is it?

commercetools has been growing a lot lately, and we want to continue doing that. Not only do we have new product owners, UX experts and developers joining, we are also growing areas around the core…

Integrating Siri in Existing E-Commerce Apps

Voice-activated assistants and digital assistants are becoming more and more present in eCommerce industry. In fact, trend watchers estimate that 30% of browsing will be screenless by 2020. In 2018…

Writing Your First Code Generator

While in most industries, there is fear of automation and the impact it might have on the job markets, software engineering is the total opposite. The whole purpose of software engineering is to…

From Slack to Production

We maintain UI-Kit, our open-source component library outside of our product repositories. It has its own Github repository, it’s own CI setup, and it’s own testing suite. Today I want to go through…

Reverse Image Search with Machine Learning

The Machine Learning team at commercetools is excited to release the beta version of our new Image Search API. Image search (sometimes called reverse image search) is a tool, where given an image as…

Virtual Reality and commercetools

The commercetools development lab does not have a modern home overlooking a forest. This experience exists only in an immersive state through two lenses and a small covered headset. Yet the house…

Adding Consistency and Automation to Grafana

Many DevOps operations utilize and rely on Grafana as an essential tool to monitor production environments in real time. However, mission critical dashboards for monitoring are often made “by hand”…

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 in Barcelona

This year we’ve attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 Europe in Barcelona. It’s the largest Kubernetes conference, and this year more than 7000 people attended. The conference is so big, and the…

Reflections on building and maintaining a React Component Library

Lessons learned supercharging our large React application by creating a custom component library.

Building up a Data Science Team from Scratch

There are plenty of reasons for companies to incorporate data science and machine learning into their business. It can allow you to better understand and predict customer behavior, automate…

How to reduce the distance when the UX designer works remotely

As my colleague Ida explained, the product team has embraced vertical, cross-functional teams. Each vertical team has its own UX/UI designer that focuses on the team’s area of responsibility. I am…

GraphQL and REST Level 3 (HATEOAS)

APIs don’t come in one shape or form. How we at commercetools compare REST Level 3 to GraphQL and why GraphQL comes out on top.

GraphQL adoption at commercetools

It has been a while since we have written about GraphQL at commercetools. If you’re new to this topic, I’d suggest to have a look at our journey, our challenges, and how we model mutations. Over the…

Why you should build a React Component Library, and style it with CSS in JS

When your React application gets too big, break it into smaller parts. Building a component library will help you develop features faster, easier and with better test coverage

Augmented Reality: Commercetools in AR

The commercetools development lab does not have a giant robot poster. It only exists in a superimposed state through a camera lens and video feed. Yet the poster looks real and can be sized, rotated…

Keeping a React Design System consistent

Ensuring visual consistency is one of the biggest challenges of working on a UI component library.

Improving Data Quality with Product Similarity Search

Poor data quality is a bottleneck for every e-commerce business as it can undermine its own competitive standing and hinder the management of data. Product similarity search or commonly known as…

Mutating Objects: What Can Go Wrong?

We all know that mutating objects can lead to unwanted side effects, and can introduce hard to trace bugs, and make code hard to test. In this article we are going to go through some of the issues…

Product Discounts in commercetools

With the holiday season approaching quickly, and Black Friday on our doorstep, brands are looking now more than ever to offer creative and exciting deals for their consumers. What will catch a…

Prisma Horizontal Scaling: a practical guide

If you’re reading this, you probably heard about Prisma. If not, you will find some references about it at the end of this article. Assuming that you are now familiar with Prisma and are eager to use…

Why Seven is the Magic Team Size

The throughput of any development team is the collective throughput of the people on that team. People are happiest and most productive when they’re on a team that’s the right size. Two person teams…

Best Practices for handling API Clients

We recently re-designed our API Client UI from scratch. In this post, I want to share best practices on handling Access Secrets, and how these influenced our new design. Every micro-service, every…

How commercetools Hires Product Managers, Product Owners and Product Marketing Managers

I’m a product person through and through. While I spent the first seven years of my career as a developer and later as an architect, I never felt truly “at home.” I was always missing the “why” of…

Why we’re investing in the CloudEvents specification

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve released support for CloudEvents 0.1! The specification is an effort by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The goal is to provide a common way to describe…

Google Cloud Next 2018

We had the chance to visit Google Cloud Next 2018 which took place on 24–26 July, 2018 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It was a blast hanging out with so many developers and meeting people…

ScalaDays 2018 Berlin Takeaways

I had a wonderful week around the ScalaDays 2018 in Berlin. Since I got a Scala overdose it made me feel like sharing this experience in form of a Recap with takeaways. Overall I learned much more…

The Order is a-Changin’: Implementing Order Amendments using Event-Driven Messages

Event-based architectures are sweeping IT architecture, and for good reason — turning events into messages offer the ability to connect different systems in a scalable, distributed, loosely coupled…

Web Security for Single Page Applications: great impact with little effort

As the web keeps growing, so do the challenges that we need to undertake in order to maintain a high level of trust and security for our Web Applications. Recently browser vendors have been…

Enjoy our commercetools API with httpie and jq! Part 2 of 2

In this second part of how httpie and jq can be used with the commercetools API, we will show how the tools can be used together to perform a checkout process. To do so we need to do the following…

Enjoy our commercetools API with httpie and jq! Part 1 of 2

There are so many ways to consume our commercetools (REST) API: in different languages, with different SDKs, with the API playground or not even using REST but our GraphQL API instead. In this blog…

Vertical Teams and Collective Thinking

At commercetools we are organized into vertical cross-functional teams dedicated to specific feature areas (such as the checkout process, prices and products), as opposed to horizontal teams which…