Behind the Scenes

“Product analytics” can mean a lot of different things to different people. Intensive SQL modeling? Managing and analyzing user data? Running AB tests? Contributing to the vision of the product through strategic analysis? All of this and more can fall under the broad category of product analytics. Figuring out where…

Interviewing at many tech companies focuses on algorithms and data structures, especially for new graduates from colleges. These core concepts represent demonstrable skills of potential candidates. Often, industry interviewers weigh whether candidates understand these topics well enough at a general level. They will build from that foundation into specific areas…

Great ideas can come from anywhere—at Lucid we truly believe that. While it’s not directly listed in our core values, all four of our values create space for us to find and deliver the best ideas at Lucid. Teamwork over Ego — It’s not about where an idea comes from,…

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…

March 12, 2020 was a dramatic day at Lucid. A huge change was announced by our CEO, Karl Sun. Due to rising concern over COVID-19, all employees would begin working from home immediately. The announcement was both surprising and appreciated. However, that was not the only big shift for Lucid…

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…

Like many companies, Lucid employs the use of Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Humans and Computers Apart (CAPTCHAs). They provide our system security benefits such as decreasing the likelihood of bot accounts and hindering user enumeration attacks. However, we have found that they also present unnecessary friction to…

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…