The Importance of Idempotence When you hear “distributed systems” you might think of big clusters of machines and large AWS bills, but the same rules apply to systems of all sizes. Whenever you have two or more
IntelliJ Tips and Tricks Yext is primarily a Java shop—aside from a smattering of Go, all of our backend systems are written in Java. For a long time we used Eclipse, which was the standard IDE at
Strange Loop 2018 We’re back from St. Louis! It’s our third year attending Strange Loop and, as usual, it was awesome!
What's a good unit test? Maybe you’re writing a brand new class, or perhaps you’re staring at a thousand line file and wondering - what should I test? The answer is actually simple - you should test the
Fall Recruiting 2018 It’s September, which means it’s time for campus recruiting. We’d love for you to drop by and talk to us!
Customizing Distroless with Bazel At Yext we are moving more of our hybrid on-premise / cloud workload to containers orchestrated with Kubernetes, from a home-grown job management system using un-sandboxed Linux processes.
Pure Functions Pure functions are one of the central concepts in functional programming—they’re the building blocks for several complex and powerful ideas. However, pure functions are also incredibly useful when used outside of a functional
Cracking Int To String One of our oldest interview questions is int to string, where we ask candidates to, well, convert an int to the corresponding string. Back when I wrote a series on technical interviews, I
Debugging Fundamentals Debugging’s a critical skill that every software engineer needs to learn. However, it’s something that’s rarely taught. For many engineers, you kind of just have to figure it out (often through trial and
Global Day of the Engineer 2018 Happy (slightly belated) Global Day of the Engineer! We celebrated yesterday by getting cupcakes for all of our engineering teams.
A tale of two alerting mediums When creating alerts, there are many factors to consider. What metric will be alerted on? At what point do you trigger an alert? How long should the metric be outside of the alerting
Introducing Edward Developing a set of microservices applications can be complicated. A lot of attention is paid (rightly) to the deployment process, but getting your development workflow right can be just as important in the
Full Speed Ahead: O'Reilly Velocity Conference Previously, Nick discussed his adventures through our Learning is Good program in his Strange Loop Scoop. This year, a handful of us went to Velocity, a conference centered around systems engineering and building
If it ain't broke, don't break it Last year, I wrote a post about how we were planning on replacing our aging location data search system (ProfileSearchServer v1) with a updated version that used Elasticsearch as a backend.
