Bringing creative projects to life.
Technical articles and stack decisions from Kickstarter
Problem Solve Your Way to Better Product Copy
As Kickstarter’s Senior UX Writer, I’m passionate about empowering my design and engineering colleagues to contribute to the copy process. Why? You know this one already — everyone writes. We write…
How to KonMari™ your Git Repo
I work at Kickstarter with a good amount of productive engineers and we use Git branches. As the organization grows, more and more branches get created and pushed to our remote GitHub repo. As time…
Supporting Open Source: Our Donations for 2018
At Kickstarter, we use a lot of open-source software. We pledge in our PBC charter to support a more creative and equitable world, and that our operations will reflect our values. As part of that…
Fabric for Open Source Android
So you’re thinking of working on an Android application that will be open source or you join a codebase that’s open source. There are many things to keep in mind when you’re working on an open…
A Guide to Mindful Communication in Code Reviews
Code reviews are a core part of being a software engineer. Most of us review code every day. Technical skills are needed to review code thoroughly and quickly. But beyond that, reviewing code is…
Event Sourcing made Simple
Most software developers use a tool to keep track of code history. Git is a fantastic example that’s used widely across the industry. Type git log and you can see all the changes made to a codebase…
Return to the Temple of ELK-emental evil, Part 1
About a year ago the Ops team here at Kickstarter embarked on a grand journey to update our infrastructure. One of core pieces we needed was a centralized logging service to handle logs from all our…
onCreate()-ing Kickstarter’s Android app
Once upon a time, Kickstarter existed on the web and iOS. Creators and backers rejoiced! But as our creative community blossomed, Android users were left in the dust. “Why is there still no Android…
Namespacing Actions for Redux
Like many other companies, we here on the Kickstarter front-end team have been rewriting our site as a React app, with Redux to handle application state. This post is about our investigations into…
FRP at Kickstarter and Kotlin
If you’ve browsed the code for our open source iOS or Android apps, you may have noticed that we try to follow Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) patterns wherever possible. For an introduction…
Upgrading Kickstarter to Rails 5
Fall is here! Change is in the air. And as of last month, Kickstarter runs its two biggest applications on Rails 5: our payments app, Rosie, and our main app, Kickstarter. In this post, we’ll…
How we built automated support
This is a story of collaboration between Data, Community Support, and Engineering at Kickstarter to build a support automation tool.
Functional Swift Conference 2017 — Brooklyn
On April 15th Kickstarter hosted the fourth ever Functional Swift Conference, which is the third time we’ve hosted it at our office! It’s an all-day event with 10 speakers (4 were Kickstarter…
Why you should co-locate your Xcode tests
The default structure for Xcode projects has a directory to hold implementation files and another directory to hold test files. There is no standard for where files are placed in each of the…
Always Be Learning
One of our core values at Kickstarter is to “always be learning.” Employees here regularly hold teaching sessions — called “ABLs” — to share knowledge about anything from oil painting to functional…
