What’s new this week from Engineering at Constructor?   Well, any given week the fifteen teams within Constructor’s globally distributed engineering department complete around a hundred tickets and launch them in production as they are ready.  

But as a list of a hundred tickets is a bit demanding attention wise, we are going to highlight some of the more interesting things that we released this week and ask that you visualize us smushing bugs and helping customers with the rest of our time, in the style of an exterminator themed Mario from Nintendo. Which actually existed (the character was called Stanley the Bugman).  And now the updates!  This week we:

• Updated various software dependencies to stay ahead of the curve on security
• Added a new and improved traffic splitter for A/B testing different platform configurations
• Added new data pipelines to predict which group a non-grouped product should exist in
• Added functionality to append structured content to collection results from the customer dashboard
• Conducted an analysis of position bias in results across a range of customers
• Enabled bundle recommendations, a new recommendations algorithm we’ve seen lead to conversion and revenue lifts in multiple ab tests, across most customers

Let’s-a-go!

~ Engineering at Constructor.

Constructor’s benefits are only as good as our uptime and performance. For this reason, we have robust standards around both. During the holiday season and the peak demand period of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we increase our standards out of recognition that it is the most important selling period for many of our customers.

Over the past year we worked continuously to drive even better performance and scalability, contributing to improved latencies and zero downtime.  We tested scaling to 2000% of current average daily traffic volume.  We used chaos testing to validate that catastrophic failure of the following supporting infrastructure does not impact critical features.  And on top of that from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday we:

• Freeze all deployments except for the most critical fixes
• Over-provision all infrastructure above and beyond typical scale-out policy
• Double our on call rotations for automated alerts
• Enter a state of elevated monitoring of all services

We take uptime and performance very seriously because the best conversion optimization and machine learning are moot if we do not deliver fast and stable service consistently. Please feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you have any further questions.

And now for the updates!  What’s new this week from Engineering at Constructor?  We’ve been cooking up more than a few things.  In fact we’ve made lots and lots, with some powdered freeze dried lots sprinkled on top. In addition to improving platform uptime and performance, smushing various minor bugs, and helping customers, we also:

• Added more data points to our core analytics platform for future merchant analytics needs
• Improved dashboards and monitoring of internal services in advance of Black Friday
• Upgraded support for quizzes in multiple client SDK's (Python, JavaScript, Android, Node)
• Experimented with running internal services on ARM based architectures for improved performance
• Added support for ingesting product catalogs directly from Salesforce using cartridges
• Prepared several tests to be run at a later date for various product ranking models
• Added facet to facet filters for recommendations
• … and tested a new backfilling approach for complementary recommendations

Bon appetit.

~ Engineering at Constructor.