Kubernetes
Migrations
At HBC, we are always looking for ways to improve the digital experience for our customers. We strive to improve the customer experience as well as reduce operational cost. Like many large organizations, we have a significant investment in our digital platform. Over the past five years, we have completed multiple system migrations. This has reduced complexity and allowed our organization to focus on future opportunities.
Deployments
At HBC, we use modern engineering practices to manage our e-commerce platform. Our engineers have adopted multiple techniques to ensure that production code deployments go smoothly.
How to Deal With Time Zones in Database and Distributed Systems
Time zones can be one of the hardest and most confusing sources of technical issues in modern software systems. In this article we’re going to go through some common rules of thumb for dealing with datetimes when architecting those systems.
Presentations we love: 2019
This is a list of our favorite presentations from 2019. We will update this list throughout the year.
Make Your Own Serverless CI
Automation is essential to maximizing throughput, especially when it comes to being able to confidently release quality software. I believe that anything you find yourself repeating is a great candidate to automate. In most cases, these repetitive tasks can be represented as simple functions! So that got me thinking… maybe I can leverage AWS Lambda for this– things like pull-request review hooks and automatic package versioning + publishing.
Small batch deployments
The Hudson’s Bay Company is an organization known for challenging the status quo. HBC’s engineering group is no different. HBC engineers are constantly looking for ways to improve the speed and quality of the software that runs our business.
Presentations we love: 2018
2018 was a year of growth and learning at HBC Tech. Our organization embraced new technologies and new ways of building application software.
Microservices at HBC
HBC’s commerce platform is constantly evolving to support new business requirements. Our platform’s microservice architecture enables engineering teams to rapidly build and deploy new features.
Email: from macro-service to micro-service
Email Engineering recently migrated all transactional emails to CNS v2. This was a slow migration as CNS v1, although, referred to as a micro service was anything but one! We inherited CNS v1 towards the end of last year and started migration to CNS v2 in the beginning of this year. In doing so, we followed what could be labeled as a flavor of Strangler pattern. In this blog, I...
Would You Rather be Awesome or Deadly?
Over a year ago we began to experiment with new ways of helping our teams in finding their next improvement opportunities. We started with an assumption that while every team is unique, there must be a way to approach a “team health” conversation in a similar fashion across them all. By using a standardized assessment we also expected to find some areas in which organizational improvements would be beneficial. In...