InVisionApp

Join InVision CTO Sanjeev Katariya for a talk on developing AI

Hello—InVision CTO Sanjeev Katariya, here. I’d like to invite you to a virtual talk I’m giving for the Arizona Technology Council’s (AZTC) Tech Sector Speaker Series on Tuesday, Sept 15 from 3:30 - 5 p.m. GMT about the experiences organizations face on their AI journey. AI is transforming the world, but organizations need to understand the problems, opportunities, and solutions that come with the technology when implemented in the workspace.

Why I Joined InVision as CTO

I may be a CTO, but people—even more than technology—are what excite me. I’ve been lucky enough to work at companies that touch nearly every corner of the world. At Microsoft, I was fortunate enough to help found major technological, team and product initiatives and see them through to rollout. These initiatives, from inception like Windows NT (1990), MSN (1993), the first Microsoft Internet Search service (1995), Natural User Interfaces (2001) and Microsoft Teams (2015), taught me that people and collaboration are the driving force behind successful product and tech design.

Innovating with Distributed Hackathons

Innovation is the lifeblood of a tech startup. Keeping it flowing is a challenge for every tech startup that grows beyond a small team and that challenge is multiplied when a company is fully distributed like InVision. Last month we kicked off our first distributed, cross-team hackathon with an explicit goal of breaking team silos and getting that lifeblood flowing. Spoiler alert; it was a huge success. This article aims to capture that lightning in a bottle to help both our future selves and other companies replicate our success.

Our New-Year Pairing Experiment

InVision is a distributed company with a good number of engineering teams. Because of the remote nature of the work, it’s easy to start feeling isolated or disconnected unless you put something in place to help combat those feelings. In our case, somewhere around mid January, my team got the crazy idea in our heads that we might be able to curb feelings of remote isolation by finding more ways to work together instead of alone.

Join us for the Global Day of Coderetreat on November 16th

For the 10th anniversary of the Global Day of Coderetreat, InVision is once again hosting a remote-friendly event. In the spirit of GDCR, the day will be dedicated to providing an encouraging space for practicing the fundamentals of software craftsmanship such as modular design, pair programming, and test-driven development. It’s free to attend and open to all skill levels. Join us starting at 10AM EST (UTC -5) on Saturday November 16th.

Building the Inspect measurement engine

Not too long ago I had the opportunity to construct a measurement system inside of Inspect that depicts and calculates the distances between two layers. In-between each layer, a line is drawn with a label that displays the distance. Supporting lines are added to the nearest edges of the hovered layer to help give the user an idea where the measurement lines reach. In this article, I’ll explain some of my ideas and how I managed to take a fairly complex problem, break it down, and deliver something of value to an end user.

Join us for the Global Day of Coderetreat on November 17th

InVision is hosting a remote-friendly event for the Global Day of Coderetreat. GDCR is an opportunity to practice software development and design in a friendly and low-pressure environment. Come join us on Saturday November 17th starting at 10AM EST (UTC -5) and plan for a fun and enlightening day. There is no cost to participate in this event. What will we be doing for eight hours? After a quick introduction to the tooling for the day and some administrative words, participants will pair off into teams and begin a 45 minute coding session.

Introducing go-health

Today, InVision is excited to introduce go-health — the scalable health checking library for Golang services. go-health is designed to help developers set up Kubernetes health check probes that are safe from DoS attacks and scalable for large deployments. The challenge Kubernetes has two kinds of health check probes: liveness probes and readiness probes. Readiness probes signal to the kubelet agent that a pod can begin handling traffic. When a readiness probe is defined, traffic will only reach a pod after a 2xx status response is received from the readiness probe endpoint.

White Elephant Holiday Festivities

Here at InVision, we enjoy a fully distributed work environment. We get to work with people from all across the globe every single day! Our unique environment comes with many perks and great experiences, and we wanted to add to that by doing something special together for the holidays. We had to find something that would actually work and be fun for a fully remote team. Think new tradition and memorable as well.

InVision Expands Their Bug Bounty Program with Bugcrowd

Last year we wrote about our new bug bounty program launch with Bugcrowd, and now we are excited to announce that we are expanding the scope of our program and increasing our rewards by 80%! We are adding our marketing sites and InVision’s enterprise service offering to the program profile. This will give security researchers around the world greater opportunity to identify and submit application vulnerabilities with a new premium paid to expert level exploitation.

9 Tips for a Painless Microservices Migration

The InVision platform started on a monolithic codebase. Like many SaaS companies that have grown rapidly, we found ourselves needing to move to microservices in order to scale our pace of development across multiple engineering teams. We’re not going to argue that we should have started with microservices first. In fact, we agree with Fowler’s MonolithFirst approach. The complexities of microservices will slow down a small team. As we’re in the middle of moving to microservices, we found ourselves asking:

My Time as an Intern on the Engineering Tools Team

Entering InVision, I had programming experience from computer science classes throughout high school, but I didn’t have a good sense for how software is actually built by teams in the real world. My time at InVision allowed me to gain experience developing with new technologies while getting exposure to the practices and methodologies used in the industry. I’m based in Portland, Oregon, so on my first day I actually went into a physical InVision office downtown.

6 Unexpected Things I Learned from Working as a Remote Intern

“See you guys on Monday!” I said as I waved goodbye to my coworkers. The twist? While I was in New Jersey, they were working from Austin, Seattle, Newfoundland, and Madrid. My farewell was quite literally a sign-off- I waved by inserting a 👋 emoji, logged out of Slack, then walked ten feet to my kitchen to start cooking dinner. This summer, I worked at InVisionApp as a software engineering intern.

How we learned go in a day

I really like going to hackathons. Usually I gain a lot of new experience, meet new people and have fun. It doesn’t bother me that I have to be awake for 24 hours, it is always worth the time. I’m part of the mobile team that has normally written APIs with NodeJS, but when the company decided to use go as our primary backend language, we realized that no one in the team had any experience with this language.

Twin Cities Networking Event

The InVision Engineering team is coming to the Twin Cities! To register, sign up on our nVite page. At Invision, we’re building an amazing company with fantastic collaborative design products that our customers love. But to build an amazing company with fantastic products, you need exceptional engineers. It turns out exceptional engineers are hard to find; they don’t reply to cold call emails or LinkedIn messages. Exceptional engineers value word of mouth, in-person experiences, and want to see you hustle.

Cross-Team Project Management at InVision

InVision currently has over 20 engineering teams focused on building and operating a piece of the InVision platform. To scale this model, each team operates much like a small startup – with their own product manager, designer, engineering manager, and engineers. With minimal coordination outside their team, they ship features quickly. But as we mature the product, some changes affect more than a single team. New architectural foundations, integrations, or UX design work often impact large areas of the product and require coordination to ensure consistency and an on-time delivery.

Five Tools Kotlin Gives Android

In the history of native Android development we’ve had several options for languages to code in. But Google historically hasn’t given us any first party support for other languages other than Java and C++. That all changed at Google IO 2017 when they announced support for Kotlin. If you’re using the latest version of Android Studio then you’re already set up to use Kotlin. The IDE can also convert your existing Java code into Kotlin in case you want to see how a rewrite looks.

Introduction to CSS modules

These days there are several problems when you’re writing cascading style sheets. CSS files usually grow really fast, and you’ve probably experienced the following difficulties: Classes defined in global scope; Dependencies; Elimination of dead code; Minification; Sharing constants; Non-deterministic resolution; Encapsulation. In addition to these points, when a development team doesn’t adopt good conventions and best practices, all the style sheets become rather difficult to maintain and extend.

OSCON 2017 and InVision Engineering in Open Source

Our Platform Team grouped up for a great trip to Austin, Texas for this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention - (OSCON-2017). It was a great opportunity to see what kind of innovations were going on in open source, connect with companies whose products we use, and generally catch up on technology trends. InVision builds much of it’s software stack on open source projects. Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Golang, NodeJS, React and many other projects make up the stack at InVision.

Adapting to Serverless Computing with AWS Lambda

Recently, we at InVision switched our image processing from using a self managed traditional service to using AWS Lambda for better performance, throughput and reliability. Every day, InVision processes over 250K Sketch or Photoshop artboard images uploaded through Craft Sync. Our self managed service did the job, but it inherently came with maintenance and monitoring overhead, which was a drag on our development velocity. When we needed to make a major change, we took the opportunity to try a new approach: “serverless computing” with AWS Lambda.

InVision Rye: Serving Static Files and Performing Magic

I work on a services team. We don’t do websites, generally. Of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t have a need for websites. But it is somewhat odd to hear that a design-centric company has a small team of developers who really don’t work on websites. We spend most of our time deep in the depths of RESTful API development or server-side multi-threaded processing. Now, granted, all of us on the team have worked on websites in the past.

InVision Home Offices: What Working Remotely Looks Like

Working remotely is growing in popularity all over the world. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data in 2015 showed that 24% of employees reported doing some of their work remotely, up from 19% in 2003. Personally, I love it and can’t imagine going back into an office setting. I’ve made my home office into my own little oasis, a place I feel comfortable being in for hours at a time.

Mobile Conversations: A Journey in Product Development

Sometimes you make the wrong choice and have to throw away substantial investment for the sake of a better user experience. At InVision we have a big vision of creating the tools that are shaping the future of our world. By equipping designers, developers and makers, we are contributing to that future by providing the tools to design and develop it rapidly and collaboratively. As we continue to mature as a product, we are constantly attempting to better address our users pain, and mobile-done-right can be a key contributor to addressing the pain felt during rapid design collaboration.

Live Webinar: Reconsider Bug Bounty Programs

InVision’s Johnathan Hunt presents why you’re vulnerability blind without a bug bounty program

Seattle Go Meetup: Middleware in Go, InVision Rye

I got an opportunity to represent InVision Engineering at the January 2017 Seattle Golang Meetup with a discussion about Middleware in Golang, and our open source project Rye which brings yet another player to the middleware space. The meetup took place on January 10th, in the Tune space which used to be Seattle’s iconic Belltown Billiards. The meetup featured mostly enthusiasts of Go from the greater Seattle area. Presentation Talks The first talk that was presented was two representatives from Microsoft discussing Visual Studio Code and the Go plugin.

Schema Migration

At InVision, we manage dozens of database schemas across hundreds of instances. Some of these schemas contain hundreds of millions of records and live on large MySQL clusters while others are small, brand new services with fledgling databases. Whether your databases are large or small, schema migrations play an integral part in any rapidly growing platform. The InVision engineering organization continues leveraging microservice architecture more and more, resulting in parallel development that screams for automation.

Automated Mobile Testing with Docker and Codeship

Automated mobile functional testing is hard. When you support a plethora of devices, OS versions, screen sizes and complicated math for positioning it can be very difficult to automate the validation of your application in a reliable way. So for a while we didn’t… Gasp! Hiss! I know… As an Engineering Manager, I had some specific requirements if we were going to go down the path of investing the development time and effort into setting this up properly.

Making Time for the Good Stuff

We all get really busy and when we’re really busy, it’s easy to get into reactive mode. Answer that @mention in slack, make decisions in meetings, or jump on quick ad-hoc calls. This can feel really productive since you’re keeping things moving forward. However, when you reflect on yesterday’s achievements, can you even remember what you did? Do you find yourself looking at your calendar to see what you accomplished for the week?

InVision Launches Public Bug Bounty Program with Bugcrowd

Offers To Pay Hackers Up To $1,500 USD To Find Security Vulnerabilities

InVision Achieves SOC 2 Type 1 Examination and PCI Compliance

We’re excited to share with you today that we have successfully completed a Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 1 examination related to the Security principle of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Trust Services Principles (TSPs). The third-party examination, completed by Schellman & Company, Inc., covered the design and effectiveness of Opower’s data security controls over the Enterprise and private cloud offerings of InVision’s award-winning design collaboration platform.

Monitor NOT All The Things

git commit -m "Initial Commit" “Why does Support know about issues before we do?” asked the CTO. “A better question is, why do customers know about issues before we do?” A series of e-mails followed the conversation that gave some more insight into what he was thinking. He knew the answer, and he knew that we didn’t. Almost all of us had written what we would have considered “enterprise” software. We had cool tools like New Relic and Kibana that we would use during an incident to help point us (eventually) at the cause of the problem.

Hail the Heroes!

If you were asked to identify the biggest killer of productivity for a software engineer, what would you say it is? You might say “email” or “drop in managers” but those two things have the same root cause. Disruptions! : The mother of all flow killing work place activities. Disruptions can obliterate an engineer’s productivity. After each distraction is over it takes about 23 minutes to refocus on the task that was at hand1.

React Performance Tune-Up

At our recent engineering offsite my team took the opportunity not only to plan out and design some new features we’re starting to build but we also spent some time tuning our existing React application to make it even faster. Here are a couple of the quick wins we had and a few additional techniques that might help you spot bottlenecks and tune up your own app. You can’t tune what you can’t measure, so a large part of any performance effort is properly instrumenting both your application and your testing environment to measure and analyze the deltas as you work.

The Power of the Why

More and more the answer of the question, ‘Can we build it?’ is increasingly, yes, yes we can, but as we continue to mature the question more and more becomes, ‘Should we build it?’ - Design Disruptors Understanding the power of the Why of what you are doing– by understanding your users’ story, provides both the passion and insight to deliver better products in the face of seemingly insurmountable pressures.

Deploying to Multiple Kubernetes Clusters with kit

Here at InVision, we have a unique challenge. We don’t just have a single Kubernetes cluster, but several, all completely independent of each other and all needing automated updates via our CI/CD process. And although these clusters generally run the same code, the configurations differ. Things needed to work smoothly and automatically as we couldn’t afford to add friction to the deploy process or encumber our engineering teams. This led us to building and open sourcing our own continuous deployment solution for Kubernetes that we called kit.

Refactoring Permissions - Part 1

Welcome to Thunderdome … (refactoring important logic at scale) Permissions affect every aspect of an application with users who have varying rights. This three part series outlines the process and the techniques we used to pull off a hat trick of decoupling crucial business logic and reducing the overall complexity of our application. Part 1 - Refactoring Permissions Part 2 - Probing and Comparing your Results Part 3 - The lessons we learned the hard way Why refactor permissions anyway?

Beyond hangouts: InVision’s first engineering offsite

Working at InVision has been my introduction to full time remote employment. While I had telecommuted before, it had always been a day here and there, or maybe a week if I was sick and didn’t want to spread cooties around the office. It’s been over a year now and I have fallen completely in love with working from home. Although, it’s not just working with my cat in my lap that makes it enjoyable.

Passwords don't have to be hard

There sure seem to be a lot of people and organizations getting their emails hacked lately, aren’t there? While they all love to blame “sophisticated hacking techniques” wielded by “powerful nation-states” I’m going to let you in on a little security secret: Many of these hacks happen at least in part due to poorly chosen passwords. So simple. So embarrassing! Better to play it up as if it was inevitable, unavoidable, like it basically came down to force majeure, right?

How ESLint Saved Our Soul

I admit, it’s not on my list of “great times” to hear that the code style you’ve spent weeks defining will require “having to suck the soul out of the codebase”. But truthfully, it was a breath of fresh air. Okay, maybe the messaging could have been less dramatic. Maybe less “Fire and brimstone”. But we’ve all been there, right? A new person joins a team and starts changing the way things have been done for what seems like no good reason at all.

Making remote working work

Remote working is a fast-growing trend in the modern workforce with many benefits such as organizational commitment, increased job satisfaction, better job performance, and lower work stress and exhaustion. I believe, along with many others, that this is simply awesome! It’s a remarkable opportunity for us — programmers from all over the world — to collaborate and work together on interesting and challenging projects with amazing and talented people. Working from home – or anywhere!

GopherCon 2016 Highlights

At InVision, we are huge fans – and avid users – of Golang. We love its simplicity, low overhead, excellent concurrency model, and its well thought out standard libraries. And, to be honest, it’s just a lot of fun to write code in Go. As such huge fans of Go, and as a shop that likes to stay on the cutting edge, we were excited to be able to attend GopherCon 2016 this year.

Tidier Commits using Git --patch

Git is one of the most powerful tools in a software workflow, and knowing tricks to bend it to your will can help you to be more efficient and keep your repository better organized. It has an overwhelming amount of tools under the hood, and today we’ll be looking at the enormously useful --patch mode to see how it’s often a better option than a plain old git add. A Simple Example Let’s start by creating a simple test repository containing a few text files.

Retaining and Developing the Best through Evaluative Feedback

In the fast-paced startup world the mantra is most often: more, better, faster. And while that statement is a bit tongue-in-cheek, it is often not far from the truth and in some cases for good reason. With the great many factors fighting against business (specifically startup) success, it’s no wonder that insightful, evaluative feedback is very often one of the first things cut out in the constant search for more time.

Exceptional Engineers

At InVision, we’re building an amazing company and delivering fantastic products that our customers love. It turns out that in order to build an amazing company with fantastic products, you need exceptional engineers. At InVision, we are growing our engineering organization by first hiring people with the skills, drive, and desire to build great tools for digital product design; and then by helping them increase their skills and effectiveness through coaching, mentoring, and training opportunities.

Express Integration Testing with SuperTest

Put down that REST Client (or, gasp, the browser!) you’re using to test that API you’re developing and back away slowly! There’s a better way! With SuperTest there’s no need to verify your API by hand. Plus, using it gives you virtually free integration tests. Now you can test and code new features at the same time. I’ve recently used SuperTest to verify complex data access roles per user. If you’ve developed an API, you’ve probably had a requirement to do something similar.

The Trials of Mobile Automation at InVision

Anyone who works in mobile development can relate to the pain and frustration of long build times, device provisioning and installation management. The InVision mobile team struggled with these things for some time before we threw up our hands and shouted to the heavens for help! After much toiling and iterating we have completely automated our mobile build process and nearly eradicated all frustration around this part of our job.

Logging for CoreOS and Kubernetes: How Containerization Saved the Day!

It seemed a simple request: store the system logs from our EC2 instances living in AWS. Seems pretty fundamental. After all, Amazon already provides an agent for shipping logs to their API. This should be a no-brainer. A slam-dunk! Not so fast! Our instances run CoreOS, part of our Kubernetes infrastructure, and nothing was showing up. Need to get creative… Things get interesting On a more traditional Linux based system it would be a simple matter of running the CloudWatch agent which would tail one or more log files sending that information to AWS via the CloudWatch APIs.

Testing Our Shared ESLint Configs

It started out as a string of Fiddler on the Roof jokes about our favorite JavaScript linting tool: I kind of wish @geteslint would end its error report with "TRADITION!" and a link to: https://t.co/9o0ig7UJuQ — Kevin Lamping (@klamping) February 17, 2016 ESLint: "Tradition!" BabelJS: "Transpiler, Transpiler" Typescript: "If I Were A Typed Lang"https://t.co/HVsWdHbLpZ — Evan Goer (@evangoer) February 17, 2016 "Because of eslint, we've kept our balance for many, many years.

Better Pull Request Management with Custom Labels

GitHub has some neat features for managing pull requests, but sometimes it’s tough to quickly get a high-level status for each request. To improve this workflow, we’ve implemented a custom labeling pattern for pull requests on some of our code repos. Using GitHub Labels, we mark the state each PR is in, so that it’s clear where the Pull Request is at in its flow. The Main Flow Almost all PRs move through the following cycle:

Persist Redux state by using Sagas

redux-saga is a fairly new library in the Redux ecosystem, one that has quickly gained adoption and traction in the community. We’ve started using sagas to manage image uploads and to implement a history mechanism (undo/redo). We really liked the way it helps orchestrate complex flows that have side-effects, by using ES6 generators, which promote more readable asynchronous code and simpler unit tests. Our app already persisted the state by loading it from the server on page navigation and by saving it periodically, after some specific actions were triggered.

Higher-order Components

A Higher-order Component is a function, or component, that wraps around your regular React components allowing you create more reusable code. A HoC has the same lifecycle methods a regular React component, because under the hood, it is a regular React component. Your HoC can have it’s own state, methods and props, which are then made available, via props, to the wrapped component(s). This comes in handy when you have a handful of components doing 90% of the same setup, rendering or actions.

Optimizing Webpack for Faster React Builds

If you’ve got a slow Webpack build with a ton of libraries - fear not, there’s a way to increase incremental build speed! Webpack’s DLLPlugin lets you build all of your dependencies into a single file. It’s a great alternative to chunking. The file is later consumed by your main Webpack configuration or even on other projects sharing the same set of dependencies. Your typical React app may contain dozens of vendor libs depending on your flavor of Flux, add-ons, router, and other utilities like lodash.

Sharing ESLint Across Teams

ESLint has won us over, and any doubts we had about the need for “Yet Another Linter” have been answered. Anyone can customize ESLint as they please, using both the built-in rules and creating their own. Then when you’re done with that, sharing your settings is amazingly simple. You Get ESLint! And You Get ESLint! One looming question we had when researching ESLint was how we’d manage our configuration across dozens of different code repos.

8 Tips for Mastering JavaScript Promises

In the previous post, Understanding JavaScript Promises, we learned how simple and useful Promises can be. Here are 8 tips to help you take advantage of that simplicity, and become a Master of Promises! 1. Know the terminology Talking about Promises is much easier when you know the right terminology. A Promise is pending while it is still working. When the work is complete, the Promise is fulfilled (or resolved).

Understanding JavaScript Promises

JavaScript Promises have been growing in popularity for several years, and have finally become a part of the JavaScript specification! Promises are easy to understand, and make it easy to write asynchronous code. A simple explanation of a Promise A Promise makes it easy to write code that waits for a background task to finish, and then continues once the result is ready. This happens by calling promise.then(...): // Let's start by getting a "user" object over the network: var promiseForAUser = getUserFromTheNetwork(); // We don't have a "user" yet!

Welcome to the InVision Engineering Blog

Welcome to our new engineering blog. InVision is known as a design company – more accurately a collaborative design company – but there is a lot of interesting engineering that goes on behind the scenes, so we are an engineering company too. We work on real-time interactive collaboration tools that have to be pixel perfect, 100% reliable, fantastically usable, and enterprise-grade secure. On this blog, we’ll talk about how we do all that from an engineering perspective: Our technology and architecture, our tools and techniques, our people and processes.