Some organizations do not proceed with a project until they have an agreed-upon test plan. Some organizations write them along the way. And some organizations never get around to thinking about them at all. To start, let’s talk about what ... Read More »
Re-architecting the Sprint Demo for a Growing Engineering Team
This year, Conductor adopted a new method of showcasing engineering accomplishments that promotes interdepartmental communication. Twice a month, we engineers put on our orange t-shirts, and go to the Conductor Café to speak about what our team has worked on ... Read More »
Running a Selenium Grid using Docker and Compose
As an engineer who’s responsible for maintaining an automated testing system for continuous integration, building it and making it reliable can be a challenging and time-consuming venture – but one that ultimately pays off. Conductor Searchlight, Conductor’s content intelligence platform, ... Read More »
A guide to publishing JavaScript open source projects
So you’ve just completed development of your first JavaScript library, and you think it could help the rest of the world. You’ve heard people discuss the “open source movement” or “GitHub profiles,” but you’re still a novice at this whole ... Read More »
Cucumber Testing: A Language Everyone Can Understand
Software quality is not the test team’s problem The Test Team at Conductor is small – by design. Quality is not just the Test Team’s problem; everybody is responsible for the quality of our software. The Test Team’s mission is ... Read More »
Using Backbone.Hoard to Spare Your Server and Sanity
tl;dr: Use Backbone.Hoard to prevent duplicate server requests. As an application developer at Conductor, I spend a lot of my time developing Searchlight, a web presence management platform that contains all sorts of reports to help our users gain actionable ... Read More »
Dungeons & Developers: 5 Traits of Great Tech Leads & Dungeon Masters
There are a lot of different kinds of nerds in the world. Some nerds are programming wizards, harnessing the power of arcane languages to create awesome applications. Other nerds fancy themselves more literal wizards, rolling handfuls of polyhedral dice to ... Read More »
Data Stream Processing: A Scalable Bridge from Kafka to Hadoop
You may use stream-oriented systems to parallel process real-time, time-sensitive data. You might also use data stream processing for bulk operations with time-insensitive operations, like data analysis and persistence operations. At Conductor, we use Kangaroo for bulk data stream processing, ... Read More »
Life as a Software Engineer: Learning to Work With Ease
“When I think back to the times I was at ease as a programmer… those were some of the hardest-working times!” -Kent Beck Some years ago I worked in tech support. Back in those days it was pretty wild supporting ... Read More »
How to Visualize a Real Time Data Stream: What Miley Cyrus Can Teach Us
At Conductor, we collect a lot of data from and about the web, and it won’t come as a shock to you that sometimes we may even want to see that data. However, when your web crawlers are generating gigabytes ... Read More »