Remote Ensemble Programming at Meltwater

Ensemble programming at Meltwater

Ensemble programming (also known as mob programming) is by now a well known practice for collaborative software development. As remote work becomes more common, ensembles face a new set of challenges.

This post describes some of the practices that has evolved over a few years of remote ensemble programming at Meltwater.

Innovation Unleashed: Inside Meltwater's Global Hackathon

At Meltwater, several times a year, our global engineering team participates in an exhilarating 3-day hackathon. This event, conducted in a hybrid model, invites every engineer, regardless of their location, to bring forth their innovative ideas, and collaborate from their home office or on-site at their local office.

Embracing Neurodiversity in Software Engineering Teams

In today’s rapidly evolving tech industry, embracing neurodiversity can unlock the potential of employees with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), leading to increased innovation, productivity, and collaboration. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the unique strengths and challenges of ASD and ADHD employees in software engineering teams and share actionable strategies for fostering an inclusive work environment that celebrates neurodiversity.

Promoting replica shards to primary in Elasticsearch, and how it saves us $12k during rolling restarts

Promoting replica shards to primary in Elasticsearch

At Meltwater, Elasticsearch is at the heart of our product - we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our usage of it and make it more performant. Recently we noticed when doing a routine rolling restart that the first backup taken after the restart took up to 7 hours instead of the normal 30 minutes. We also noticed that our snapshot storage suddenly increased in size by about 500TB. Elasticsearch performs incremental snapshots to only upload newly indexed data so both these observations were unexpected. There should have been no sudden change in the data caused by the restart. We took a closer look at this and were able to figure out what the problem was.

How to Communicate Effectively in a Software Development Setting

Effective communication is a crucial aspect of success in business and software development settings. It can help build better relationships with colleagues, increase productivity, and achieve better outcomes. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some key strategies to help you communicate effectively in business settings.