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…
We’ve all been there. After hours or even days of tirelessly trying to narrow in on the cause of some small bug, you finally close in on a particular section. You know the problem is in there somewhere, but the code is spaghetti—an impossible-to-read, jumbled mess of logic that does…
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,…
As any SaaS engineer can tell you, things that are simple in a single user scenario can easily balloon out of control when many users need to be accounted for. Take the simplest use case imaginable: editing a file. In a single-user scenario, it’s easy as pie. Read the bits,…
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…
What makes a good API, the kind that developers will jump at the chance to work with? That’s something I’ve had plenty of time to ponder as we’ve built Lucidchart add-ons for Slack and HipChat over the past year. While both messaging apps offer similar features to users, they provide…
I joined a rapidly-growing startup called Lucid Software (creator of Lucidchart and Lucidpress) in January 2013 after turning down a job offer from Microsoft. While I was grateful for the Microsoft offer, I wanted a job where there would be opportunities to move quickly into a leadership position. I love…
Uglier than a Windows backslash, odder than ===, more common than PHP, more unfortunate than CORS, more disappointing than Java generics, more inconsistent than XMLHttpRequest, more confusing than a C preprocessor, flakier than MongoDB, and more regrettable than UTF-16, the worst mistake in computer science was introduced in 1965. I…
Image source: xkcd Selenium can be one of the most powerful tools in the QA Engineers’ arsenal. Unfortunately, it can be time consuming to write, a nightmare to maintain, and it can produce way too many false negatives. At Lucid Software, that is where our suite was in the middle…
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…