Architecture

At the beginning of this year, Lucidchart rebuilt its editor in Angular 2. The new editor delivered a better experience with far fewer lines of code. Both engineers and product managers enjoyed it because it made writing features easier. The old (left) and new (right) Lucidchart editor But, there was…

Here at Lucid Software we use a hypermedia-driven application architecture. This means that a client that uses our micro-services simply has to hard-code a “bootstrap” resource URI, and we can re-jigger our endpoints whenever we choose. This approach gives us flexibility on the back-end while maintaining perfect compatibility with our…

System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) allows an enterprise to manage users across multiple cloud applications using a single interface. It might be helpful to think of it in terms of its original and more memorable acronym, Simple Cloud Identity Management. You ended up with this poor configuration accidentally. Where…

UPDATE 8-22-16: This post has been updated to use Angular 2 version 2.0.0-rc.5. It was originally written against the API provided by Angular 2 version 2.0.0-rc.4, but as Tom Nurkkala pointed out in the comments, the relevant API from version 2.0.0-rc.4 has been deprecated. UPDATE 9-24-16: A more succinct variation…

Almost every product change made here at Lucid is first validated by an A/B test. Over the years, we’ve made a lot of mistakes while running A/B tests and writing the code for managing them. In this series of posts, we’ll be sharing what we learned from these mistakes and…

How Apt transports work, how we wrote one for S3, and how you can write your own. Debs in S3 Lucid Software uses Debian packages (debs) for packaging and installation. Custom scripts download the debs from a private AWS S3 bucket. As much as we loved the quirks of homegrown…

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,…

We’ve all been there: your production system is running great and uptime has never been better. One Wednesday morning you wake up, enjoy a nice breakfast, and head off to work—when a few dreaded notes from your phone tell you that production has just gone down. You buckle the racing…