Blog

Over the course of this summer I spent 11 weeks as a Software Engineer intern at Sandtable. I had a wonderful time here and learned a lot from some very knowledgeable and friendly Engineers. We worked with Trello, which I am very fond of, to organize our tasks and had daily morning chats about what everyone …

For a recent Sandtable hackathon, we built a prototype of a highly-available cluster (master-worker) framework. We decided to use etcd3 to store master state, for leader election, and implement a presence protocol. Etcd, developed by CoreOS, is a distributed, reliable key-value store written in Golang that implements the Raft consensus protocol. For leader election, we …

"I think we found something that AWS doesn't do well at scale." - overheard in the registration queue We once again attended the AWS Summit in London with more than 6000 visitors expected. In order to enjoy the event, you'd have better been early... or you could have end up in a massive registration queue or …

(Edit (27/02/2018): For the latest code, see our repo.) We have recently started using gRPC at Sandtable and we really like it. gRPC is an HTTP/2 based open-source RPC framework released by Google in 2015. It uses Google's Protocol Buffers as the interface definition language and data serialisation format. gRPC can be used from a number of different languages, …

We were excited to attend for the second time QCON London (you can find our review from the past year here: day 1, day 2 and day 3). QCON is a conference running for 3 days targeting CTOs, Software Team Leaders, Architects and Senior Software Engineers, with a focus on emerging technologies. The talks are divided into tracks …

We are using Kubernetes 1.4 in AWS to host several websites. Originally we had one pod and one service per website. We then created one Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) per website. To simplify the drawings we have indicated pods but you’ll see that we actually use deployments. As those websites are for development purposes, we wanted to …