In software development, nobody can predict the future (well actually, nobody can ever predict the future, in any situation). Part of the job description of Betty Blocks Chief Technical Officer Daniel Willemse and the rest of the tech team at Betty Blocks is to make sure that the platform is as future-proof as possible.
That means having a clear vision for performance of the platform in terms of target goals, but also taking proactive steps to ensure that the tech team is ready to strike when problems inevitably arise. Growing from just 4 members in 2016 to nearly 20 today, the Betty Blocks tech team is an experienced and passionate group of brilliant minds.
Here’s a look into how the Betty Blocks tech team puts those minds to work to ensure that users’ platform experience runs smoothly.
Nasty outage surprises? Not with ramped up monitoring
Perhaps the most essential step is to maintain a good monitoring practice so that the tech team has a good overhead view of the platform’s overall health at any given time. “Our monitoring dashboards let us see all the servers that are running at once so that we know where there are spikes in activity or requests coming in that we didn’t anticipate,” says Daniel. The tech team is always working to make sure that monitoring is up-to-date with the most current information possible so that they can respond to potential outages.
Notifications? We want to know everything
Monitoring is a good reactive practice to respond to issues within the platform, but part of the tech team’s job is to be proactive as well--to stop problems before users notice. “We want to be on the case before a customer notices that there is a problem,” Daniel says. “Our goal is to increase the frontlines of defense so that we know immediately when an issue occurs and can fix it before a user is even aware that there was a problem.”
The tech team is constantly working to add more checks via monitoring and notifications so that whenever a server is down, the tech team will be alerted and can respond immediately. “It’s a continuous process where we are always adding more monitoring checks and notifications to alert us to things we haven’t encountered before,” says Daniel.
And in terms of future prevention? Everytime an incident happens, the tech team makes a formal report to minimize the chances of it happening again. This includes installing new monitoring practices and notifications to watch for new threats to platform stability.
ISO27001 certified
An important facet to the security of the Betty Blocks platform is ISO27001 certified, to ensure the integrity and security of data stored within the platform. More than attesting to the stability of the platform itself, ISO certification provides guidelines for handling situations.
ISO guidelines help an organization by providing a framework for problem solving, when issues do arise. “That’s why we’re so proud of that certificate. It helps us solve problems and do so in a compliant way that ensures quality,” says Daniel. “We learn from our processes, learn from mistakes, and each time we make the right changes in our process to improve.”
What’s next?
“We’re always looking for new technologies, and are willing to change the way we do things if the end result is better platform performance, and a better user experience,” says Daniel. With performance improvements, the speeds at which actions and pages are retrieved and executed on the platform will increase noticeably for users.
What is the tech team working on now in terms of performance improvements? Transitioning the platform to a new code base using Elixir.
The reason for the shift is that Betty Blocks has outgrown the original programming language that the platform was built on. With more users-- and bigger companies as customers-- the platform needed a language that would support scalability for bigger jobs with improved speed.
Need for speed
“We’re almost ready to deploy an update where expressions will be calculated with Elixir,” says Daniel. “Users will notice a huge difference in the time it takes for expressions to calculate, with the added scalability that Elixir provides.” How much of a difference? “We've seen cases where throughput was 48x faster. We've also had cases where they were only 5x faster. It all depends on the customer and the application,” Daniel says.
What will be the next step for the Elixir migration? Running sandbox environments and merging the features back to parent applications on Elixir. “We’ve seen the time it takes for apps to merge decrease from 8 hours to mere minutes with this change, depending on the application,” says Daniel.
Grids, for example, already run on Elixir, and if you think back to how long it took for responses about a year ago before the change, you can get a sense of the noticeable speed improvements that are on the way.
So even though Daniel and the Betty Blocks tech team can’t predict the future, a big part of their job is to put measures in place that ensure the platform is as strong and healthy as possible, to encounter any eventuality.
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