Archive

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. Innovation and continuous improvement...

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...

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...

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. Know Your Audience Understanding your audience is...

This is the 7th and final part of our blog post series on how we upgraded our Elasticsearch cluster without downtime and with minimal user impact. In this post, we will focus on several of the benefits we have seen after the upgrade and provide more details on how our architecture looks...

This is part 5 in our series on how we upgraded our Elasticsearch cluster without any downtime and with minimal user impact. Due to the large scope of this upgrade, it was clear from the beginning that this project was going to last for at least one year, if not more. This...

This is part 4 in our series on how we upgraded our Elasticsearch cluster without any downtime and with minimal user impact. In part 2 we explained that we decided to do a full reindexing of our entire dataset as part of this Elasticsearch upgrade project. This blog post explains some of...

This is part 3 in our series on how we upgraded our Elasticsearch cluster without any downtime and with minimal user impact. As part of the Elasticsearch Upgrade project, we needed to investigate the search performance improvements between the old and the new versions. Running an older version of Elasticsearch has presented...

This is part 2 in our series on how we upgraded our Elasticsearch cluster without downtime and minimal user impact. As described in Part 1, our requirements were to both provide a smooth transition between two different versions of our system, while still keeping the opportunities for a rollback open. With that...

Back in 2018, now five years ago, we published a blog post describing our 400+ node Elasticsearch cluster. In that post we brought up an important topic: So far, we have elected to not upgrade the cluster. We would like to, but so far there have been more urgent tasks. How we...

We had another Devopsicon — our internal engineering (un)conference. We record most of these company-internal sessions to ensure we can share the knowledge with those who were unable to attend, and to build a knowledge base over time. We have decided to go one step further and share some of these sessions...

A growing Engineering org may reach a point where answering questions that used to be simple have become hard. At least that is true for us! Questions such as: “Who owns this?” “Do we have a component that I can reuse?” “Where are the docs for that API?” This post shares the...

János Csorvási and Jeff Campbell were both part of our Foundation team, when we started our DevOps transformation at Meltwater Engineering a couple of years ago. Now they got together on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast to share how that transformation looked like from the perspective of the development teams. Topics of...

At the heart of Meltwater Engineering are the employees who find ways to collaborate around the world. In our Spotlight series we will introduce you to new hires as well as veterans from across the organization, and give you insights into their day to day from North Carolina to Hong Kong. Today,...

The social media landscape is changing at breakneck speeds. As Product Manager for Meltwater’s Social Content Marketing product, Andrea needs to stay up to date about everything happening with our competitors and in the industry as whole. In this post Andrea shares how she greatly reduced her manual research time, using our...

We couldn’t be more excited: We have not one but two speakers sharing Meltwater stories at PlatformCon 22. Federico Hernandez and Simone Sciarrati work on our Foundation/Platform teams, who help the rest of the org deliver solutions faster. This post contains summaries and videos of their talks. From 0 to Platform -...

At the heart of Meltwater Engineering are the employees who find ways to collaborate around the world. In our Spotlight series we will introduce you to new hires as well as veterans from across the organization, and give you insights into their day to day from North Carolina to Hong Kong. Today,...

The last 7 years taught us a lot about Devopsicon - our beloved unconference format. In this post we share how this event came about at Meltwater Engineering, and how it is striving in present days. For this we interviewed organizers and participants to give you an idea how the unconference works...

April is Stress Awareness Month. Since 1992, Stress Awareness Month has increased familiarity about the causes of and cures for stress in our modern world. Particularly ubiquitous amid the pandemic, stress affects our mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. This month-long event reduces the stigma of discussing negative emotions and increases the likelihood...

At the heart of Meltwater Engineering are the employees who find ways to collaborate around the world. In our Spotlight series we will introduce you to new hires as well as veterans from across the organization, and give you insights into their day to day from North Carolina to Hong Kong. Today...

March 4th is Employee Appreciation Day! With that in mind, how do we show appreciation for our employees at Meltwater? One of the most influential places to get feedback and gratitude is from our peers and colleagues. How do we make it easy to foster an environment where we feel encouraged to...

At Meltwater, we are great believers in “participant-driven meetings” like unconferences, as we’ve written about in the past. Recently I started a little discussion community using Lean Coffee as a meeting format. Here’s a quick rundown of what it is and why I like to use it and how it works in...

Often, we tend to focus on compensation and benefits when negotiating job contracts. We forget to question how a job will accommodate one’s life and personal needs. Ideally, a company and employment should be flexible to fit your life, not the other way around. In this blog post I’ll talk about what...

My team at Meltwater is responsible for tracking how our customers consume the variety of content that we offer. We also build aggregate reports to help our Sales team understand customer behavior. That requires collecting and querying billions of usage events each month. In this post, I will share which technical solution...

At the heart of Meltwater Engineering are the employees who find ways to collaborate around the world. In our Spotlight series we will introduce you to new hires as well as veterans from across the organization, and give you insights into their day to day from North Carolina to Hong Kong. As...

Meltwater is proud to have donated to the FIRST diversity & inclusion program! FIRST® is a global non-profit focused on advancing STEM education, and inspiring young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators. The DE&I program at FIRST helps to serve an inclusive and diverse audience, reflecting the population of...

Deploying web applications can be extremely challenging. Even if your application only relies on a single API endpoint, many mistakes can still make it to production just by having to rebuild your javascript and CSS artifacts for each environment. That’s where Immutable Web Apps and npm can step in to help out!...

At the heart of Meltwater Engineering are the employees who find ways to collaborate around the world. In our Spotlight series we will introduce you to new hires as well as veterans from across the organization, and give you insights into their day to day from North Carolina to Hong Kong. Today...

In the midst of the pandemic and months into working from home, Hardik Gupta, a data scientist at Meltwater, was missing the social connection of going into work, specifically the spontaneous conversations with people from other business functions and teams. He decided to experiment with emulating these conversations remotely and #mw-coffee-chat was...

Have you ever been asked “how does the impact of an Agile Coach change as the team matures”? In an attempt to explore this question I will describe my experience as an Agile Coach working with one team for 2 years. I will examine how my impact within that team changed during...

AWS is a wonderful ecosystem in terms of infrastructure, but the UX and the sheer number of domain specific terms can be overwhelming when you are trying to understand how to do things. Migrating a database from one account to another turned out to be more complicated than we first assumed. In...

Two members of the Meltwater Foundation team, Federico and Simone, contributed to the CNCF End User Technology Radar, a guide for evaluating cloud native technologies. Recently they were interviewed by the New Stack Makers Podcast about the report’s findings on how the Kubernetes multicluster management landscape is taking shape. CNCF Assesses the...

Have you ever worked with somebody, and you only found out after 6 months that they had feedback for you that would have greatly improved the way you collaborate. However, somehow that feedback was never given? We have certainly seen this happening in our Engineering teams, and hence we started to experiment...

We are happy to announce that Meltwater is sponsoring the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s scholarship program. The program offers diversity and need-based scholarship to individuals who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend CNCF events. The Product & Engineering team at Meltwater strongly believes in the value of such programs, and...

Our UX team updated Meltwater’s user personas in 2021. Originally created in 2016, they needed to be revised due to changing markets, changes in our product, and the industry as a whole. In this post, Andy Proehl, our director of user experience design shares what we changed and what we learned in...

With so many of our own employees and their families impacted by the recent wave of Covid cases and deaths in India, mPowered, Meltwater’s employee-led diversity and inclusion group decided to take matters into their own hands and created a micro-donation site to raise money to specifically address the oxygen shortage in...

Our very own Tim Furche, Director of Data Science at Meltwater, was interviewed by swordandthescript.com. They discussed topics such as the relationship between NLP and artificial intelligence (AI), the value of NLP to PR, as well as the enhancements that Meltwater has recently made to our NLP. For the full story: Geek...

Simone Sciarrati and Jeff Campbell from Meltwater joined the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast to discuss how the way we organize teams can impact the effectiveness of an organization. In this episode, Jeff (long time contributor to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast) and Simone (Engineering Team Lead at Meltwater) share the journey of...

For three days in June, 238 people from Meltwater Product and Engineering organized and participated in our first remote unconference. The event featured 118 sessions focused on sharing knowledge, training, and problem solving. The event received an overwhelmingly positive response from the people that attended. In this blog post we take a...

Last week, Jeff Campbell and Scott Rosenblatt from Meltwater joined the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. In this mega-episode on change, Jeff (long time contributor to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast) and Scott (Director of Engineering at Meltwater) share their experience with Agile adoption in a large organization. Topics of the podcast include:...

Meltwater recently released a new product feature called Signals, which helps our customers to identify business-critical events. In a previous post we introduced the concept of record linking, and presented our first approach for merging information from multiple sources for our Knowledge Graph. In this second post, we share how we improved...

Meltwater recently released a new product feature called Signals, which helps our customers to identify business-critical events. One of the technical systems powering these Signals is a custom-built Knowledge Graph. In this post we explain how we created a record linking service that utilizes machine learning and big data tactics to cluster...

The Meltwater Engineering teams have always been doing a lot of remote collaboration, due to the distributed nature of our company. Still, we have to get used to the work-from-home situation where we cannot even meet the colleagues in our own offices. In this post Niall Burkley from our middleware team shares...

In early spring 2018 Kubernetes went into Production at Meltwater and has seen great adoption from a lot of our engineering teams. Our Kubernetes cluster went from hosting 150 services at the end of 2018 to more than 800 services 9 months later. As part of our involvement in the Cloud Native...

Gene Connolly and Jeff Campbell joined the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast for an episode on boosting collaboration and promoting DevOps culture. Gene (Principal Software Developer at Meltwater) and Jeff (long time contributor to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast) share their own experience organizing Internal Unconferences, and why this may be exactly what...

Our Application Framework team was tasked with assessing and improving application performance. Analyzing performance across the globe is challenging. The architectural layout of Meltwater’s application, as well as the way we organize our teams, lead to various challenges. This is the first post in a series about front-end performance. We will share...

To provide structured data from the Web to our customers, our team maintains a web crawler. The system downloads and processes 600K URLs per hour, resulting in huge amounts of logs. That costs a lot! In this blog post, Róbert from our Crawler team explains how we modified our architecture to save...

When you start at a new company, the first weeks are a turmoil of new things. The Meltwater Product & Engineering team is no different. When new colleagues join us, they go through an onboarding phase with parts that are standardized across the company, and other elements custom to their team. Still...

AWS Auto Scaling Groups may seem outdated in a world dominated by Serverless and Kubernetes, but they still have their place in Meltwater’s AWS infrastructure. One thing we felt was missing in Auto Scaling Groups are unique instance names. EC2 instances launched in the ASG are given the same Name tag, with...

Meltwater takes pride in having autonomous devops-enabled teams. This includes decisions on how to deploy their infrastructure. In this post Andy Desmarais is sharing an introduction to the newest deployment method that his team is experimenting with, the AWS Cloud Development Kit. You also find more articles like these on Andy’s blog...

This week Jeff Campbell and Amer Hamzeh (both alumni of Meltwater’s Foundation team) shared their experiences in the early days of the team on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. This episode is especially helpful if you are in a team where you find yourself suffering a lot of interruptions. Give a listen...

We love Open Source here at Meltwater, and like most modern software companies, we would not be able to operate without it. One project that we are especially fond of is Benthos, “the stream processor for mundane tasks”. In this post we share how our relationship with Benthos started, how we are...

If one source says Microsoft’s headquarter is in Seattle, and another source has it in San Francisco, how do we determine which one is more plausible? The literature calls this the truth discovery or veracity problem. In this blog post Andreas Klintberg from our Knowledge Graph team shares how Fairhair.ai uses the...

In early November our Front-end Guild hosted a workshop in Berlin. 13 engineers from offices around the world, met with our Application Framework team, to build a new framework-agnostic component library for our application teams. In this post, we explain how the Front-end Guild is helping Meltwater to break through team silos,...

For quite a while I am maintaining the Engineering blog for Meltwater at underthehood.meltwater.com. What flew under the radar for a number of years as a side project, is now pushing out multiple blog posts every month, and is helping the company both externally and internally. The blog attracts 50k unique page...

A sea of yellow shirts made its way around Manchester as the New Hampshire Meltwater office volunteered for a day with a local organization, Families in Transition. When the volunteer committee first started planning this day, we never imagined how smoothly it would go, or how much fun we’d have! Impacting our...

Joan Freed and Gene Connolly from our Manchester office were invited to the Arrested DevOps podcast with Jessica Kerr to discuss the DevOps transformation at Meltwater. In this podcast they are sharing where the transformation towards more autonomous teams with full end-to-end responsibility started in 2017, what we learned over the years...

Last week, a group of 25 practitioners met in the Meltwater office in Berlin for an unconference about applying product management to internal platforms in the Engineering Enablement domain. In this post we share some of the topics discussed at the unconference, and how we want to take this inter-company exchange about...

Halloween approaches each year as a surprise, at least to some of us. Especially as Meltwater has offices in 55 locations across the world, keeping track of the regional customs for a given occasion can be tricky (see Geography of Halloween for example). Hence we are fortunate to have local culture ambassadors...

In September I traveled to the small town of Sitges outside of Barcelona to learn more about the future of technology. Full Stack Fest is a yearly, single track conference touching on a broad range of tech topics (frontend, backend, testing, new languages, etc). I was there to absorb some of the...

Since July 2019 I have been an intern at Meltwater in Budapest, working in the Foundation team that is focused on developer productivity. It has been a truly valuable experience to solve challenging real-life problems, that have an impact on the everyday lives of our developers. In this blogpost, I will share...

In late August 2019 Meltwater had the pleasure of hosting Zalando in our Berlin office for a knowledge sharing session about applying product management for internal platforms that improve software delivery performance. In this post we will explain how this meeting came to be, provide a sneak peak into the topics we...

For our fairhair.ai platform we enrich over 450 million documents such as news articles and social posts per day, with a dependency tree of more than 20 NLP syntactic and semantic enrichment tasks. We ingest these documents as a continuous stream of data and guarantee delivery of enriched documents within 5 minutes...

Meltwater has been providing sentiment analysis powered by machine-learning for more than 10 years. In 2009 we deployed our first models for English and German. Today, we support in-house models for 16 languages. In this blog post we discuss how we use deep learning and feedback loops to deliver sentiment analysis at...

You certainly like podcasts, don’t you? Jeff Campbell, an experienced Agile Coach working with Meltwater, recently joined forces with Vasco Duarte to record a series of podcasts for the Scrum Master Toolbox. In the podcast series they chose a Q&A format, where the audience submits questions that Jeff and Vasco then discussed...

One of our teams at Meltwater was recently faced with a problem that required relatively simple tasks applied to a large volume of data. To solve this we experimented with a pattern we call micro-pipelines, which are a sequence of microservices that work together to create efficient, fault tolerant systems. This post...

Benthos Lab is a website where users of the Benthos stream processor can write, format, execute and share their pipeline configurations. This app is now a critical part of our Benthos workflow, but it would never have existed were it not for Meltwater Hackathons. This post explains how we built Benthos Lab...

Meltwater’s Foundation team has invested heavily in Kubernetes to provide this platform as a service to other development teams. Many of those teams have migrated to Kubernetes already. Naturally our Foundation team learned a lot about what can, and will, go wrong when running a big enough Kubernetes cluster. Recently they attended...

Meltwater has been using Kubernetes in production for over a year. The theme for this meetup was “difficulties and pitfalls” so we wanted to share our lessons learned from offering Kubernetes as an internal service to our engineering teams all around the globe. It was the second edition of the CloudNativeGbg meetup...

We open sourced drone-cache, a plugin for the popular Continuous Delivery platform Drone. It allows you to cache dependencies and interim files between builds to reduce your build times. This post explains why we are using Drone, why we needed a cache plugin, and what I learned while trying to release drone-cache...

We Germans are known for our love of renewable energy, energy saving lamps, and recycling. I am allowed to say that, as I am one of “them” :) Our office in Berlin had another idea to reduce waste: Lunch boxes (“Brotdose” being one possible translation of that). Most of us like to...

At Meltwater, we have been running a quarterly employee survey with 350+ people in the Product & Engineering group for three years. This post explains our journey, our approach and what we have learnt. Read on if you are wondering how an employee survey can help you understand your organization better and...

Our team was challenged with a project that involved performing actions based on plain-text requests. Having little experience in Data Science, Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), our initial approach amounted to nothing more than “AI based on if-else statements”. To improve our approach, we invited our Data Science team...

My team and I have built a solution that mines a stream of online articles for real-time insights for our customers. This component’s logic could be dramatically simplified if we could assume that it never receives near-duplicates of articles. While deduplication of identical documents is simple, detection of near-duplicates (i.e. “same thing,...

Have you implemented a system that is supposed to perform tasks at regular intervals? Does the repeated failure of such a system pose a threat to your quality of service? If so, I am sure you would want to be alerted, if your system suddenly stops performing these tasks. We at Meltwater’s...

Today we are excited to share our Immutable Web Applications methodology with you. Immutable Web Applications is a framework-agnostic methodology for building and deploying static, single-page applications that minimizes the complexity of live releases and enables continuous delivery through simple, flexible, atomic deployments. If you care about building web applications, and want...

In Meltwater’s Berlin office, we are enthusiastic users and advocates for Elixir and ruby. Hence we were excited to get the chance to host the Elixir Berlin meetup for the first time this November. It was the #53’rd edition of the Elixir Berlin already, what a great streak! Besides hosting the event...

At the heart of Meltwater’s and Fairhair.ai’s information retrieval systems lies a collection of Elasticsearch clusters containing billions of social media posts and editorial articles. The index shards in our clusters vary greatly in their access pattern, workload and size which presents some very interesting challenges. This blog post describes how we...

Quitsies is a distributed and disk persisted caching system that implements a subset of the Memcached text protocol. It was built as a minimal drop-in replacement for Memcached, and has been running in our production pipelines for over a year. This post explains why we needed Quitsies, and how we went about...

Would you agree that your biases are affecting your recruitment process? We have been thinking about it and we were especially curious how we can improve our recruitment process by working with our biases and learning how to disarm those when hiring. In this post we are sharing the tools and processes...

Meltwater recently launched the Fairhair.ai data science platform. Part of this platform are several large Elasticsearch clusters, which serve insights over billions of social media posts and editorial articles. The nature of the searches that our customers need to run against this data quickly make the default load balancing behaviour of Elasticsearch...

Meltwater is excited to sponsor Brewing Agile in Gothenburg on October 12-13, 2018. This is the 4th year in a row that Meltwater is supporting Brewing Agile, so you can tell that we are honestly excited about this event. This is the only conference about Agile in Gothenburg, and there are still...

Benthos is a dull and resilient stream processor that solves mundane streaming tasks. Its development is driven by our desire to defer these tasks to a common tool wherever sensible, allowing us to focus on solving more interesting business problems within our stream pipelines. This post explains why we chose to build...

Love it or hate it, CSV is a format many developers have to deal with at some stage. It’s lightweight and it’s understood by many platforms and humans. However, if you’re using non-ASCII characters (like an umlaut on the word über or accent in José) and you have users viewing your CSV...

Are you working with an ocean of microservices connected together by a message broker like RabbitMQ? Then there is a chance you have experienced queues filling up and messages not reaching their destination, most likely due to stability issues in your architecture of services. If you want to know how our engineers...

Haven’t we all been a bit nervous at times about pressing that “Deploy” button, even with amazing test coverage? Especially in the scary world of microservices (aka distributed systems) where the exact constellation of services and their versions is hard to predict. In this post I will introduce the Synthetic Monitoring concept,...

The Meltwater Mobile application development team was formed in 2014 and has grown from 3 to 18 members. We build native apps for both iOS and Android platforms. Usage of the native apps has grown in sync with the growth of the team size. In part 1 of this series we discussed...

Examplr is a lightweight tool for adding examples to your Node.js project. With Examplr, you write the smallest amount of code possible to demonstrate the critical elements of your module: the configuration, the input, and the output. In this post Evan, the main contributor to Examplr, guides you though adding your first...

The Meltwater Mobile application development team was formed in 2014 and has grown from 3 to 18 members. We build native apps for both iOS and Android platforms. Usage of the native apps has grown in sync with the growth of the team size. In this post we want to share how...

This year’s winter in Berlin has been going on for far too long. Fortunately I managed to escape to Texas, USA for a few days to speak at and attend Lonstar ElixirConf 2018. When I wasn’t eating BBQ and remembering what the sun looked like, I saw some great talks and met...

The Meltwater Bangalore team recently dedicated time to help out underprivileged kids in their local community. They collected donations in their office, and went to the Ashanilaya Orphanage in their neighborhood to spend time with the kids. In this post Rupen Paul, who was part of this event, shares his personal account...

Are you curious about the Functional Programming trend that has been growing the past years? You should be! Many exciting new and old Functional ways are reshaping the software development world. In this post I will share my favorite talks from Lambda Days 2018. I got the opportunity to travel to Krakow...

Given the volume of many million posts per day that Meltwater has to process, we need a technology for search and storage that can handle this kind of volume. We have been a pretty happy users of Elasticsearch since the 0.11.X days. While we have been through some up and downs, in...

Meltwater just released awsudo, an npm package designed to make assuming AWS IAM roles on the command line trivial. Assuming an AWS IAM role on the command line is not a simple process, and we wanted it to be a human-readable one-liner. Meltwater’s awsudo achieves this with a straightforward command that you...

We just finished our quarterly Meltwater-internal conference. As this is the 6th time that we have run the event, we have gathered some experience by now and I thought it was a good time to share what we have learned about planning and executing such an event. I wanted to share the...

While building Meltwater’s customer facing API, we have been working on a better versioning strategy. Our goal is to build a stable API for clients, but still continue to push out new features and enhancements in as short iterations as possible. Inspired by Stripe’s API, we have been working on implementing rolling,...

Last month, Meltwater gave me the opportunity to attend the Angular Summit in Boston. I jumped at the chance to travel into the city and learn about the latest iteration of Angular. Today I’d like to share my key takeaways from the event. You will get the most out of this post...

Meltwater is very happy to be Silver sponsor for Craft Conference 2017, which will take place in Budapest on April 27-28. Using the coupon code ‘MeltwaterSentMe’ you can now get 20% discount to you conference ticket. We really enjoyed Craft Conf last year, so we recommend you get your ticket now! Come...

In this post we will look at how we at Meltwater speed up the onboarding of new Meltwarriors by assimilating them into the team and company culture, using these four simple tools. Meet Hannah. Tomorrow is her first day on her new job at Meltwater. She is a little anxious over fitting...

Meltwater Product & Engineering is very proud to be an sponsor of Local Hack Day Berlin. We provide excellent food for the participants, and we hope that this will fuel the creative juices :) Local Hack Day is a “12 hour hack day that brings together the local hacker community to celebrate...

Oberbaum CityLights is a quarterly magazine that covers the area where our beautiful Berlin office is located. In their recent edition they featured our very own Sam with a story about how he came to Berlin and how he is experiencing life and work in Berlin. If you want to read the...

If you have basic knowledge of automating web application tests through your browser, then this blog post is for you. We will be demonstrating how to use Selenium in a docker container, which makes it faster for you to get started. First things first: What is Selenium? Selenium automates browsers :) What...

Meltwater is very happy to be Bronze sponsor for Stretch Conference 2016, which will take place in Budapest on December 1st/2nd. After a big group from Meltwater visited Craft Conference earlier this year, we were excited to see that the same organizers were hosting a leadership & management conference as well, so...

On August 16th, we hosted the AWS User Group Meetup in the Meltwater Berlin Office. It was our first time hosting the AWS meetup and we would like to share with you what the meetup talks were about and also our experience in hosting a meetup in our Berlin office. There were...

At Meltwater we use RabbitMQ for messaging. We have several clusters and had a need for a new cluster. This made us ask the question: how is the message rate affected by the hardware chosen for the cluster? Should we go for more CPU cores? Or maybe faster disks? Are there other...

After a particularly rough couple of months last year, our team (of six) decided it was time for a radical move. At the point we were so downtrodden that our small hope that it would at least provide something new was enough of a motivation for us to decide on a two...

This April about 40 colleagues from Meltwater went to Craft Conference in Budapest. We did not plan for it that way, but it ended up like a mini kick-off for the Product & Engineering teams in Europe. It turned out to be an amazing conference with many great speakers that shared their...

We created a new video, describing how we work in Product & Engineering at Meltwater. We are quite proud of how the video turned out and we had lots of fun creating it. Therefore we hope you will like it to. If you like what you see, please check out our current...

At Meltwater we are providing our customers with great tools to analyse news and social media, unlocking business critical insights. However all of this content is written text. Therefore some other forms of media remain unconquered. Formats that are becoming increasingly dominant in all online media. Today, we want to present our...

On October 14, 2015, Meltwater co-launched nh.js in conjunction with Thunderhead and Alexander Technology Group, nh.js is a meetup group for JavaScript programming enthusiasts in Manchester, New Hampshire. The group holds events at local startup incubator Alpha Loft and has thrived with regular monthly meetups, steadily increasing membership to just over 240...

Meltwater is proud to present SHACK15, London’s first co-working space dedicated to data science startups. With the distinct advantage of Meltwater being such a global company, we are able to offer our members automatic access to a network of hot desks from Silicon Valley to Sydney via New York, Berlin, Stockholm and...

Today, we are very proud to announce that Meltwater was chosen as a finalist for the 2016 Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Awards in the category for Best Content Analytics Solution! The CODiE Awards are the industry’s only peer-reviewed awards program. To get to the finals, we had to demo...

On 22nd of March, Meltwater’s Stockholm NLP Meetup hosted a session about the technological development in a startup company called Kickborn. In this meetup Harinder Bedi, the founder of Kickborn, described a cognitive information retrieval system that understands the intent of questions and provides answers to them. The algorithm of the Kickborm...

On 3rd of March, Meltwater hosted a session of our Continous Delivery Meetup, with the fitting topic Continuously Everything. We hosted these sessions at our beautiful office at Kungsportsavenyen in the middle of Gothenburg. This time around we had three presenters from Meltwater and about 50 attendees from inside and outside the...

On 17th of February, Meltwater’s Stockholm NLP Meetup hosted a session about clinical text retrieval, presented by Professor Hercules Dalianis from Stockholm University. In this talk, Professor Dalianis described different challenges to analyse clinical texts to facilitate doctors in Swedish healthcare entities for better diagnosis and treatment. It was quite fascinating to...

We recently decided to open source our high-performance batch-percolator plugin for Elasticsearch. This article tells the story of how and why it was developed, and also gives you some insight into the scalability and performance problems we face daily in our engineering team. Early 2014, we were in the midst of migrating...

“Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design.” - http://coderetreat.org/about “a day to celebrate passion and software craftsmanship” - http://globalday.coderetreat.org The Meltwater Engineers are very passionate about software craftsmanship so it was an easy decision to host and sponsor the inaugural #gdcr event in...

What starts like a joke is really a serious post about large distributed systems. This is what we run at meltwater - and while there is a lot of fun designing and administering these systems, we run into odd problems from time to time. In this case: some well-meant Red Hat memory...

Here’s another small update from Meltwater Engineering Sweden. We are co-hosting an Elastic(search) meetup in Gothenburg together with our friends at Findwise on April 9, 2015! When Findwise reached out we were eager to collaborate since this is something we have wanted to do for a long time. Please have a look...

CHARM is an annual career fair hosted by the university of Chalmers in Gothenburg, Sweden. Meltwater was one of over 170 companies from different areas of business attending CHARM to meet students and show what they can offer them during and after their studies. Our mission was to attract talented individuals to...

No animal was harmed in this, we promise :) Nevertheless, we indeed ended up with a frog on the wall in the Meltwater office in Berlin. In Berlin we have a team that uses Kermit, the well known Muppet character, as a mascot. So we thought it would be only appropriate to...

Meltwater just initiated the Stockholm Natural Language Processing Meetup, and on October 23, 2014, we hosted the kick-off session in our office in Stockholm. The idea of creating this Meetup emerged from a Knowledge Sharing and Tech Talks culture in Meltwater’s Data Enrichment Team. We thought that we could go beyond this...

We all can be proud to have such an active AngularJS community here in Berlin. Really. The Berlin AngularJS Meetup Group which organizes monthly events with lots of interesting talks, is responsible for a big part of the buzz around the framework. At the October AngularJS Meetup we were especially proud, as...

Meltwater is proud to be sponsoring RailsCamp Germany 2014. And what is the best sponsor to be? Correct, Burger Sponsor! We are happy to help RailsCamp to provide yummy vegan burgers to all participants. So enjoy RailsCamp, and enjoy the burgers everybody. And of course, check out our open Rails position :)...

Finally under the hood, our beloved Meltwater engineering blog, got a new design. We have been running this blog since January 2013 now, and here we talk about technologies that we use in our daily work, we introduce new team members, and post job offers. Blogging has been a great way for...

Backend engineer Yury Smolsky explains how he built Meerkat. Meerkat is an alerting software, developed by Meltwater, that integrates tightly with Graphite. The Problem At the end of 2013 our team got tasked to improve the way we throttle our data fetches that are retrieving data from twitter. It is almost impossible,...

Hallo! Hello! Merhaba! I am Hans, happily married to a beautiful Turkish wife, and live in Berlin since 2002. Born in Singapore as half German, half Filipino, I have since then travelled through various countries over the years until I ended up where I am right now: Berlin! And since the very...

In July 2014, Meltwater decided to hold its first ever Innovation Day, called meltwhatever day! The goal of the Innovation Day was to take some time and let our engineers focus their energy on something of their own choosing – something that they were passionate and excited about, that was important or...

To everybody who attended our Meltwater Tech Talk about appium in Berlin yesterday: Thank you. To the rest: Where have you been? :) This post lists further references about appium that were promised during the talk. We were lucky enough to not only have Kuba Siemiątkowski in the house but also Sauce...

We are very excited to announce that on July 1st, 2014 we will have Kuba Siemiątkowski (a front-end developer at Sauce Labs) in our Berlin office, to give a talk titled Testing clicks without Apple’s help - Mobile testing with appium. This presentation is open for everybody, so if you are interested...

Bookmarklets are bringing back hackability to the internet. They help automating little repetitive tasks and making webpages dance. In this post Amer Hamzeh tells us how he fell in love with bookmarklets and why. How did I find out about bookmarklets? My first encounter with bookmarklets was while I was doing a...

On Tuesday, a bug in the OpenSSL library was disclosed. It even got a name - Heartbleed - and a logo. And it turned out to be as severe as it can get. OpenSSL is a library widely used on the internet to secure communications. When you access a page via https,...

The goal of this post is to describe a debugging session, and different possible approaches for debugging in general. It also contains some tips and tricks to use with unicorn and Rails to debug request timeouts. I usually enjoy debugging because of the unknown thing to fix, like a pirate finding a...

On Feburary 27th Meltwater was lucky enough to host the Berlin Riak Meetup in our office at Rotherstraße in Berlin. We were happy to have close to 30 Berlin Riaktors gather for talks by basho and rovio, yes the guys behind Angry Birds! After some beers and plenty of pizza, Richard Cox...

The volume of brand mentions online is exploding. With this explosion is an expectation that the “owners” of these brands will not only participate in the conversation, but take in this feedback and make necessary adjustments to products, ads, distribution, customer service, etc. To do this effectively, Meltwater needs to help company...

Salut! Ni Hao! I am Sam, and I became a member of the Meltwater family as a Senior Software Engineer a few months ago. In this blog post, let’s talk about me for a second. I happened to enter our complex world through lovely Porto-Novo in Benin, West Africa. To date, I...

In this tutorial post our Engineering Trainee Camila from the Berlin office will walk us through the process of adapting an existing open source solution for user authentication to new business requirements. The challenge About 6 months ago, a colleague gave me the idea to add JIRA to sorcery, a library used...

Today we are putting the developer spotlight on Alex, Full Stack Developer for Meltwater’s Mobile development team in Berlin, Germany. Hey, I’m Alexander Rösel and joined Meltwater in May 2013. I grew up in Berlin and still live here (which is rare to find these days). In 2001 I started playing around...

At Meltwater, we are building mobile apps using web technologies. To access platform level APIs, we use the cordova framework, commercially known as PhoneGap. In this post we want to share what we have learned in the last months about the framework and mobile development in general. First of all: It is...

Recently Balázs Gődény, Principal Engineer of Meltwater’s Natural Language Processing team in Budapest, won the Build Challenge, which is the 2nd phase of the Thomson Reuters Innovation Challenge. Congratulations Balázs!!! One quality of great engineers is that they often truly enjoy what they do. This means that they tend to have a...

In our speaker exchange, Fabian Moritz from ITaCS GmbH gave us an introduction to Microsoft SharePoint earlier this year. On Friday the 13th - what a great day to test stuff - Sebastian Spier from the Meltwater Berlin office gave a presentation at ITaCS about Testing APIs. In the larger domain of...

Today we are putting the developer spotlight on Camila, Engineering Trainee for our Self-Service Applications team in Berlin, Germany. Hello everyone. I was born and raised in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, South of Brazil. That is where I also studied and figure out my way between bits. In 2008 I...

Meltwater recently acquired LikeAlyzer, a service that helps you to analyze the effectiveness of your Facebook Pages. Along with an awesome product we also adopted LikeAlyzer’s founder Robert Andersson. We took the opportunity to interview him. Good morning Robert. First of all, welcome to Meltwater. We are excited to have you in...

Meltwater has a new data science team, located in Meltwater’s Oslo office, close to the infamous Shack 15, the cradle of our company. In this post we want to introduce the team, and the topic of data science. What is Data Science? Data Science is an emerging field, with numerous of vague...

Today the Engineering team in Berlin got an introduction to Microsoft SharePoint. Presenter was Fabian Moritz from ITaCS GmbH, who is an MVP for SharePoint Server. Besides learning about the different use cases that SharePoint can be used for, we also got an introduction to all the integration options that SharePoint offers...

Today we are putting the developer spotlight on Ruth, Scrum Master for Meltwater Buzz in Bedford, New Hampshire, USA. I was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and moved abroad in 2004. Growing up, I saw my parents travel extensively for work and pleasure, and since then, I couldn’t wait to...

All across the Engineering teams in the US and Europe we are recruiting for high caliber individuals to strengthen our different groups. Recently we had the three musketeers join our US operation, which are - as we all know - accompanied by a 4th fellow. So shouting “all for one, one for...

Meet us at booth 059 at the BME Job Fair of Technical University of Budapest on March 6-7! Meltwater is hiring the best of the best for the Budapest office. We are seeking talented fresh graduates and experienced professionals for a number of positons: Software Engineer for the Content Services and Enrichment...

It is a unique and gratifying experience to start a new major component of an already established product, and to bring it all the way from the blackboard until it eventually goes to production. Before Meltwater, I developed prototypes, which proved concepts and inspired features. I also fixed bugs and added features...

Today we are putting the developer spotlight on Deyan, Senior Software Engineer for our Content Services team in Budapest, Hungary. Before Meltwater I am from Varna, a Bulgarian town at the Black Sea coast, whose forest covered beaches I am destined to miss wherever I go. Driven by my first passion, I...

At the end of 2012 I joined the Engineering team of Meltwater Press (mPress), to start working on my master thesis on the mPress NLP search system. The title of the thesis is “Qualitative analysis for detecting shifts in system requirements of search systems”, and I am performing it under the supervision...

Today we are putting the developer spotlight on Naji, Support Engineer for Meltwater News in Berlin, Germany. History in Meltwater My name is Naji and I am originally from Lebanon. I have been living in Germany since summer 2002. I never lived anywhere else but in Berlin and those who know Berlin,...

The Developer Spotlight is a new category on our blog. I offers you a keyhole view at the work of our developers, designers, support engineers, testers, operations engineers, Scrum masters, and all other people at Meltwater that bring our products to life. We are very proud of the people that work for...

Recently I had an interesting problem to solve. Given a set of documents and the key phrases found in each document, the task is to display the key phrases on a map so that related phrases appear close to each other while unrelated ones are placed further apart. This should result in...

Want to live and work in Ghana for a year? Checkout the opportunities at MEST, Meltwater’s nonprofit organization in Accra, Ghana. I can highly recommend it! If you are interested in this topic, you may also want to read this post about my experience in Ghana on the Meltwater Careers Blog.

In 2011 I participated in the 1st ever Springer API Challenge. Here is what I learned about developer challenges in general and how they can be beneficial for both developers and companies. What is the Springer API Challenge? Springer is a publishing house with 5500 employees and a yearly revenue of 850...

Get ready Internet: This is the Meltwater Engineering Blog At Meltwater Group we develop software that helps many businesses big and small around the world to do their job even better. Among other things our software monitors news (Meltwater News), finds relevant information in social media channels (Meltwater Buzz), or identifies journalists...