A year ago our front-end was written in a cumbersome combination of Backbone, TypeScript, and a custom state management layer. It was maintainable, but we wanted to ship features faster than it would let us. We wanted to migrate to a React + MobX...
Engineering
Austin WhittierTerraform Gotchas And How We Work Around Them
Heap’s infrastructure runs on AWS, and we manage it using Terraform. This post is a collection of tips and gotchas we’ve picked up along the way. Terraform and infrastructure as code Terraform is a tool from Hashicorp to help manage...
Kamal MarhubiHow Basic Performance Analysis Saved Us Millions
This is the story of how I applied basic performance analysis techniques to find a small change that resulted in a 10x improvement in CPU use for our Postgres cluster and will save Heap millions of dollars over the next year. Indexing Data for...
Michael MalisRedshift Pitfalls And How To Avoid Them
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that’s orders of magnitudes cheaper than traditional alternatives. Many companies use it, because it’s made data warehousing viable for smaller companies with a limited budget. Since so many Heap customers use...
James KatzRunning 10 Million PostgreSQL Indexes In Production (And Counting)
Heap faces a unique set of challenges based on our approach to analytics: capturing every data point. After several attempts, we’ve managed to come up with a solution that works reliably for our use case. As a consequence of that solution, we have...
When To Avoid JSONB In A PostgreSQL Schema
PostgreSQL introduced the JSONB type in 9.4 with considerable celebration. (Well, about as much as you can expect for a new data type in an RDBMS.) It’s a wonderful feature: a format that lets you store blobs in the lingua franca of modern web...
Dan Robinson