During integration testing, one of our publishers recently reported that their Comments section didn’t work correctly after adding our tags. Nothing else seemed to be amiss, and our content was appearing and behaving correctly.
Shipping 3rd Party JavaScript comes with its own unique set of challenges...
For the last three years, we’ve been supplying our publishers with 3rd Party JavaScript to power native content distribution, helping them make a buck by providing non-interruptive, choice-based advertising. Our code is put on the publisher’s page directly, versus in an iframe (typically referred...
We test a lot at Sharethrough. One of our projects had significant complex behavior that required numerous integration tests. These tests were inherently slow, so our test suite’s running time kept creeping up. They had value and they also had drawbacks.
Since we didn’t need to run them all the time...
As part of our viewer engagement tracking, we send back a umtime parameter (MDN: milliseconds since the epoch) to our tracking servers, http://.../?umtime=1375503164030&.... Timing allows us to tell a story around how viewers engage with our content, for example “Unfolded the card, watched a video...
At Sharethrough, we TDD everything. When investigating a new language, tool or library, included in our initial analysis is “How testable is it?” and/or “How testable can we make it?” We’re currently utilizing Typesafe’s Play (via Scala) for our service layer. In order to gain experience with various...
Today we published a case study with the great folks over at Typesafe, detailing the background behind our choice of Scala for our real-time decisioning engine. Have a look at the complete case study!
Our newest case study discusses how a company made the switch from Ruby to Scala in order to meet...
Our native auction ad server needs to be fast. At the 99th percentile we consistently serve ads back to our client in under 15 milliseconds. One of the crucial pieces of tech that makes this happen is Redis. But last week we found that the way we were using Redis took us down for two hours.
A little...
From Amazon, to Spotify, to thermostats, recommendation systems are everywhere. The ability to provide recommendations for your users is becoming a crucial feature for modern applications. In this talk I’ll show you how you can use Ruby to build recommendation systems for your users. You don’t need...
With Steve Blank and Eric Ries being early advisors to Sharethrough, The Lean Startup is in our DNA. In December of 2012, our co-founder and CTO Rob Fan spoke at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco.
Data scientist Ryan Weald walks through the building of data driven products at Sharethrough, from exploratory analysis to production systems, with an emphasis on the role Ruby plays in each phase of the data driven product cycle. Big data and data science have become hot topics in the developer...
