Tag: Django

Categories
3D Architecture Distributed Teams eCommerce Frontend Innovation Management Performance Engineering VR

New VR UX For Nurseries

(3/19-10/20)

Challenge

Ship new, web-based, VR-powered, eCom experience as requirements changed.

Action

Act 1 : 3/19-5/19

While on my trip to India in April 2019, I formed a Tiger team of one of my best Lead Engineers, a project manager, and two junior engineers, coaching them to see the similarity between what was the business was asking for and current existing components of the system (PLP, PDP, NUX, and Checkout,) setting a plan in motion towards delivering an MVP for the 6/26/19 deadline.

They went heads-down and we successfully shipped v1 (following) on 5/29/20.

ecom landing page

Business priorities shifted and the project was moth-balled, leading to Act 2.

Act 2 : 8/19-10/19

Having shifted focus to more product-based eCom (see Act 1,) the business decided to leverage existing shop-the-room modeling infrastructure in a more user-friendly, web-based purchase flow.

While the original plan was to have them spin up a completely new POC with a new checkout flow, I intervened and met with the remote Technical Project Manager and Architect, providing guidance around the existing monolith marketplace system, knowing it could serve as enough of a “buy” to meet requirements so as not to have to “build” a custom solution.

Shipped v1 in Oct 2019:

Landing Page

Room Detail Page

I saved $40K in redo work after guiding the non-primary, remote, web team around component re-use while then shipping web-based, VR-powered shop-the-room.

Act 3 : 3/20-10/20

Under tight deadline, coached the Pakistani team to iterate and improve perceived and actual load times using CSS Sprites, caching via HTTP headers, use of a spinner, and gzipping in order to get a usable UI to market sooner:

Landing Page

Drilling down, a user looking to design a nursery can swap out items (made possible by a compositing technique with Three.js and photo spheres)

Room Page

Lastly, recognizing future strategic value-add within corporate partnerships, guided the team to decouple the frontend as a Single Page App for iframe embedding after having decreased page load times, introduced progressive enhancement / graceful degradation, and led the SPA strategy.

Results

New VR-powered site finally launched in Feb 2021.

Categories
Architecture Chat Collaboration Integration Site Reliability SOA Troubleshooting

Connecting Supply with Demand

(10/18-5/20)

Challenge

Ongoing reliability issues with 3rd party chat solution crucial for business operation w/o documentation and integration monitoring.

Action

The key aspect of the Decorist experience is the connection between the Client (Demand-side) and Designer (Supply-side.) To facilitate that connection, many years prior, the business had included a (at that time) nascent Chat-as-a-Solution provider as part of the user experience; it made sense to “Buy” instead of “Build.”

Architecture Overview

The chat UX is loaded into an iFrame. When users chat, their payload is posted to the 3rd party’s backend. The 3rd party then fires a webhook to Decorist which tracks the event in the DB and fires a transactional email depending on business logic.

The Problem

The ways the bugs manifested boiled down to:

  • chat UX not appearing (like below, often as the result of a 3rd party deploy gone bad)
  • emails not sending because webhooks not called

Lacking integration monitoring, issues often bubbled up through first-tier support.

Chat not loading

Improving the Dependency

Noticing the reliability issues, I first delegated to one experienced engineer to triage and then another.

I also dug in on my own and discovered/remedied bugs in our own webhooks while also providing data-backed reliability outage information to 3rd party, escalating to 3rd party’s CTO when necessary

Almost quarterly, as a company, the decision to continue using the 3rd party is re-visited given the reliability issues. Each time, though all stakeholders are aware of the pain collectively experienced, the decision has been made to punt replacing the solution.

Results

  • Ensured remediation of 3rd party issues in 24-36h, even on lowest support tier.
Categories
eCommerce Performance Engineering Site Reliability

Always Be Improving

(Decorist : 8/18-12/19)

Challenge

Leading-by-example to own and improve systems as sole ENGR having SRE/DevOps/Frontend/Backend experience.

Action

Mar 2019

Watching our AWS costs rise ~8% monthly…

Costs Rising

I learned about and subscribed to Reserved Instances to realize costs savings for our hosting spend:

Dec 2019

Though not leading to cost savings or revenue generation, part of my responsbilities have been database administration, jumping in when the production DB would spike like below, figuring out if a runaway process needed to be terminated, if a slow query was bringing it to its knees, if a cron job was introducing load, or whatever needed to be done to keep the site up.

Or when bots would crawl the site, bringing it down, necessitating an IP block:

Or when digging into the logs to find that a route was 500ing and had to be fixed:

Mar 2020

Using Cloudcraft, I diagrammed our AWS infrastructure, identifying and deleting 1000 unused SQS instances.

Also identified and deleted numerous unused RDS snapshots:

All changes led to a yet another 37% reduction in MoM AWS costs:

Results

  • Saved company 115% of my salary in 2019 through process improvements.
Categories
Backend eCommerce Frontend Performance Engineering Process

What To Do With a 9s Page Load?

(Decorist : 9/18-12/19)

Challenge

Inherited a two-fold challenge: 1) less-than-optimal user experience of 9.01s Avg. Page Load Speed and 2) a culture that did not yet value performance engineering.

Action

Idenfitied initial frontend and backend low-hanging fruit (e.g. page structure, image resolutions, N+1 queries, lazy-loading, etc.) Identifed and delegated KRs to FE leads. Introduced process to methodically follow up each week, pressing the case for performance engineering over months.

Below, a sampling …

Some initial efforts shaved ~3s of the Homepage:

Lighthouse score soared from 5 to 61:

There were multiple speed improvements of up to 50% on various pages across the site as a result of backend query improvements and a +300% bump YoY in SEO traffic (verified by 3rd party SEO consultant)

After Dec 2019, we shifted focus to non-converted UXes after having addressed low-hanging fruit for all UXes.
Sept 2018 to Dec 2019

Results

  • Record Avg. Site Page Load Speed of prevous four years : 9.03s (Sep 2018) to 4.13s (Dec 2019.)
Categories
Architecture eCommerce Management Process Re-platforming Roadmapping SOA

Changing Engine Mid-flight : Again

(Decorist : 8/18-12/19)

Challenge

Take a half-baked v1.5 SOA and continue re-platforming to support scaled integration with corporate parent and its subsidiaries.

Action

Aug 2018

When I joined, it was with the idea that I would be instrumental in helping scale the Decorist relationship-creation paradigm leading to higher AOV to its corporate parent – Bed Bath and Beyond – and its subsidiaries: Buy Buy Baby and Cost Plus World Market.

I inherited the beginnings of a movement away from a Django/Angular/MySQL monolith and towards a Django/React/Postgres multi-tenant platform; a v1.5 of the application architecture. My predecessor had extracted some facets of the monolith to build out the initial stages of the SOA in partnership with another Bed Bath and Beyond subsidiary: One Kings Lane.

Although labeled a multi-tenant platform, it had been built quickly – effectively as a prototype – to service one tenant and was not truly extensible for other silos, though it did encompass solid SOA principles for reuse.

Dec 2018

As part of roadmapping for 2019, wanting to strategically position ‘scalability’ for the corporate org, I worked with my boss – SVP Prod/Tech – to detail a project plan to leverage the exisitng nascent SaaS paradigm for the next generation of the Decorist user experience.

We were sanctioned by the CEO for reduced scope on the roadmap; it would be the very first effort internally for moving towards a new platform to future-power the site. We focused on porting a back-office, manual task of determinging supply-side match and availability with demand-side need.

Wanting to keep a engineer engaged, I shepherded him and helped him understand the Cost-Benefit trade-offs we would need to make in order to meet the deadline, setting a course of re-using the User service for authentication, builidng out a new React-based UI, and integrating with the monolith.

Feb 2019

A few months later, we delivered the feature of supply-side Matching and Availability:

Shortly after launch, business priorities shifted towards a focus on a new eCom offering and we had to back-burner re-platforming efforts.

Dec 2019

Given guidance that 2020 might be the year we could re-visit re-platforming, I ideated around what was still lacking in v1.5 and what would need to be built out, creating a project plan and technical roadmap for the go-forward.

I worked with my boss again around planning and prioritization and we again provided guidance to CEO. Ultimately, we could not secure the necessary corporate integration buy-in for further progress and have had to defer any further progress given other priorities.

Results

  • Mentored Lead Engineer towards implementation of first feature for new SOA paradigm.
Categories
Database Monitoring ORM Performance Engineering Troubleshooting

40s to 10s

(Decorist : 10/19-10/19)

Challenge

Business-critical page used internally and externally was taking 40s to load, then started timing out for everyone.

Action

  • Dug in, realized DB CPU Util was pegging at 100%, found and killed runaway DB process.
  • Setup alarm to be notified whenever CPU over 70%.
  • Page was still taking 40s, realized queries weren’t being logged, turned quereies on, saw LEFT OUTER JOINS across eight large tables.
  • Removed six lines of Django ORM select_related syntax without affecting page functionality.

Results

  • Dropped page load speed for critical internal Admin UX from 40s to 10s.
Categories
Architecture CMS eCommerce SEO

Better SEO

(Decorist : 9/19-9/19)

Challenge

Deliver SEO value faster.

Action

Prior, the dominant in-house paradigm did not realize the potential of Django to serve in a CMS capacity.

I introduced the idea to to leverage Django as a CMS to power Landing Pages, like this one:

Results

  • Empowered Marketing to manage content and reduced time-to-delivery for Landing Pages by 30%.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Growth

Funnel Changes

(Bluxome Labs : 5/14-6/14)

Following is a representative control version of the signup

Here are the variations as implemented

Before
Before

Unfortunately, none performed better than control.

Results

  • Tested signup improvements by adding breadcrumbs, hypothesizing that users were bouncing because they lacked contextual information.
Categories
Growth NUX supply-side

Social NUX

(Bluxome Labs : 5/14-6/14)

Did not actually implement social signup, merely checked for clicks on buttons (using Optimizely to show/hide based on whichever variation user was assigned.)

With social signup options above:

With social signup options below:

Results

  • Tested conversion hypotheses with social signup buttons.
Categories
Building buy-in Frontend Growth NUX supply-side

Landing Page Experimenation

(Bluxome Labs : 5/14-5/14)

Following is a representative control version of the landing page

I whiteboarded several concepts gaining buy-in from the chief product stakeholder and then implemented same, using Optimizely to set the parameter to determine which variation a user saw; below you will see the iterations.

Unfortunately, none performed better than control.

Results

  • Tracked performance of inbound traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords, and StumbleUpon and designed/implemented various landing pages to improve signup rates.