Articles by ben

This year at Lucid, we ran our first-ever Code Kerfuffle: an open coding competition consisting of two stages. The first stage was a traditional algorithmic competition administered over the Internet. Of the hundreds of people who entered the first round, 32 finalists were invited to an in-person final round where…

Recently, my team was tasked with delivering a limited version of Lucidchart to embed inside another application. Because Lucidchart would only represent a small part of the total functionality visible to the user, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t bog down the overall load time. Our total time…

Introduction: Angular 2 and Lucidchart Lucidchart launched in 2010 as one of the very first and most impressive graphical applications on the web. Over the course of several years, it has grown organically to include an incredible array of features. However, for many users it has become unwieldy over time,…

Performant canvas rendering for modern browsers Lucidchart is one of the most complex graphical apps on the web, which means good performance is an absolute must. Getting that performance out of each of our supported browsers has always been a challenge, and we’ve found the best ways to meet that…

Simple web applications can be built quickly, and the original source code sent to users’ browsers for use. While this allows for rapid prototyping and quick turnaround, it’s not a workable model in the long run for a number of reasons:

At Lucidchart, we really care about making a great application that is easy to use and intuitive for first time users, yet powerful enough for the sophisticated diagrams and mockups that many people need to create. That means that we want Lucidchart to be fast, even when a diagram gets…