Architecture

Some of the most exciting innovation development innovation is happening in canvas-based applications, which are a fundamental part of Lucid’s Visual Collaboration Suite.   In this article, I will discuss the unique approach and mindset required for designing canvas-based interfaces, explore their benefits, and provide insights into Lucid’s design principles and…

For an internal project, we decided to develop a machine learning model to perform an image recognition task on a large dataset of images, based on a defined set of categories to which an image can belong. Initially, we didn’t have a labeled set of images to train the model….

Lucid’s company-wide Hackathon is a summer tradition. Three days of intense teamwork with the goal of producing creative, ambitious projects that could transform our products. For those three days, my team modified hundreds of stylesheets to implement custom theming, including Dark Mode. As a summer intern, here’s what I learned…

Soon after I joined Lucid Software, three years ago, we decided to build infrastructure for a new kind of data-driven diagram. One that derived its primary structure from the data itself, that would enable people to think visually about their data. Our goal was to prototype a simple diagram that…

Working from home changes everything When the world started working from home in mid-March 2020, we noticed substantial and sustained changes to our customer’s usage patterns. Our performance metrics demonstrated these drastic changes. By the end of March, load times were 20-30% slower across the board, even more anomalous than…

This article is the second part of our series on why COBOL and lack of COBOL developers aren’t the real problem in maintaining legacy systems. See the first piece here. In the first part of this series, we headlined the most common mistake non-technical people make with legacy systems and…

This article is the first part of a two-part series on dealing with technical debt. The second part is here. Our modern world runs on an enormous amount of technology. A lot of it is older than people realize. This technology is mostly invisible when it is working, but when…

In the spring of 2018, our data science team at Lucid decided to move our data warehouse from Redshift to Snowflake. We decided to make this change because we felt like Snowflake was a better fit for our data flow and analysis. We knew it would be a significant change…

I’ve always loved learning about different ways messages are encoded. As a little kid I used simple substitution ciphers and created my own alphabets to encode messages to myself. From different books and my computer science classes in college, I learned more about cryptography. I found that, no matter how…

Mismanaging resources is one of the easiest ways to bring down a production system. In a development environment, it’s easy to ignore open streams and temporary files, but at production scale, they can have a hugely negative impact. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to overlook these issues while developing, even…