External Testing with Tesena
Whether you want it or not, the long term use of manual testing with in-house resources usually leads to a point where you are blind to your own bugs. Because of this, we looked for - and found - an opportunity to test our applications from the outside... »
How We Stopped Being an Image Processing Company
A few months ago, we published a post on image processing at Showmax. It’s an interesting story about a service that had been implemented long before we actually wrote that blog post. The post sparked some debate among our colleagues, and we started... »
How Ruby Can Surprise You
In the Showmax Backend team, Ruby is our preferred language. So, when we interview people for jobs and they say they know Ruby, we tend to chat about its quirks and specifics, and sometimes we put the candidate under a bit of pressure. Here, we picked... »
Prometheus introduction - How we show new colleagues the power of fire
A gentle introduction to the wonderful world of metrics
This blogpost is essentially a 1:1 copy of our internal how-to on the basics of Prometheus. While it’s relatively common for developers to hear about it, the actual deployments are still quite rare. The internal how-to aims to give a step-by-step introduction... »
Going to Lugano - Our Appbuilders 2019 Diary
Last winter, our iOS team was implementing new features into the Showmax app and, as I sometimes do during my workday, I watched talk about System design by John Sundell (who is really a nice guy btw) at https://www.swiftandfika.com. It made me want... »
Achieving a tenfold increase in Varnish throughput by replacing libvmod‑curl with native request restarts
We decided to implement authentication offloading in Varnish - later realizing that this had been a significant performance bottleneck. Here, we go through the “why” and “how” we did what we did, and how we changed the offloading implementation to... »