Thread Engineering

How to DOS a Django application with bad GET requests.
09 February, 2021 – Charles Lirsac

Like any complex production service, Thread experiences outages and issues in production that affect our users from time to time. In order to improve our service quality we run post-mortems of these incidents to identify ways to fix the root causes and improve service reliability moving forward…

Hosting and distributing Debian packages with aptly and S3
11 December, 2019 – Charles Lirsac

This article describes Thread’s current setup for hosting and distributing Debian packages. We’ll first explain why we ended up with this setup and provide steps necessary to replicate it as well as a high level cost overview.

How and Why to Kick-off your projects
10 November, 2019 – Peter Law

We’ve all been there: you’re nearly done building that feature and you just need that last piece of information from a colleague to do the final part. You message them for it and their reply contains a subtle detail, something you’d overlooked, and which completely changes how the feature needs to…

Blazing Fast Page Load with Static Rendering
17 October, 2019 – Stephen Cook

How quickly a user sees something when your website loads is invaluable. Studies from 2006 found that most users will abandon your site if it hasn’t loaded in 3 seconds. Unsurprisingly, users haven’t become more forgiving in the last 13 years. Unfortunately, modern web frameworks like React are…

Empathetic Code Review
21 August, 2019 – Matthew Power

You can tell a lot about an engineering team based on how they conduct their code reviews. From my own experience, no two code review processes look the same. That can be because conventions for how teams do their code review tend to form organically. As conventions, they tend to be ad-hoc, informal…

Joining Thread
10 July, 2019 – Stephen Cook

My first day at Thread was the 2nd of February. I ate a good breakfast, left early, and got on a train that was immediately held at a red signal for 1 hour. A good start to a new job. A Good Start Fortunately, I knew from my interviews in December that everyone was fairly laid back. You can read a…

How we hire Frontend Engineers at Thread
29 May, 2019 – Jack Franklin

We know that interviewing for a role can be an intense experience, and a large use of time for both parties. Therefore, we do all we can to make sure we provide an experience that is enjoyable, engaging, respectful and gives candidates the best chance to shine. I have good memories of my…

Custom Elements for React
17 April, 2019 – Jack Franklin

At Thread we are moving away from server driven rendering via traditional templating to a JavaScript led frontend. This is a big undertaking and one that we have to be able to do incrementally whilst we continue to build new features. That means it’s not practical for us to completely drop our…

CSS Modules (strict mode)
18 March, 2019 – Stephen Cook

At Thread, we love CSS Modules. One issue we kept seeing was references to styles.foo long after someone removed the .foo class. This dead code seems innocent enough, but over time this bit rot adds significant noise to your code. A more embarrassing issue I kept seeing involved long moments of…

GraphQL Interfaces vs Unions
28 October, 2018 – Dan Palmer

GraphQL’s type system allows us to make many invalid states impossible to represent, which improves the usability and reliability of our APIs. Two features of the type system that contribute significantly to this are Interfaces and Unions, however they can be used to address similar design…

Searching and sorting text with diacritical marks in JavaScript
29 August, 2018 – Paul Springett

We’ve been busy rebuilding Thread’s frontend codebase using React, and lately that’s included rebuilding our browse filters. These filters allow customers to find products more easily by selecting which brands, colours or prices they want to see. Because some of our filters contain a lot of options…

Dealing with legacy code in React
10 May, 2018 – Jack Franklin

At Thread we’ve a large, five year old codebase that has lived through several frameworks, libraries and techniques, particularly on the frontend. These days we’re primarily writing our frontend in React, using CSS Modules. In contrast, most of our old frontend code is jQuery layered on top of…

Scaling Django Codebases at PyCon UK 2017
02 March, 2018 – Dan Palmer

Four of us from the Thread engineering team went to PyCon UK again in September for the third year running, and I was lucky enough to have my talk selected. At Thread we use Django for the backend of the main site which has grown to over 350 “apps”, and various members of the team have used the…

Speed or quality? With Test & Delivery you don’t have to choose
07 February, 2018 – Thomas May

We’ve all been there: that new feature you’ve been obsessively refining over the last few months is finally ready to go live. You’re glowing with pride for what you and your team has built. But when release day finally rolls around, it does… well, nothing. No movement to your KPIs and a lukewarm…

How and why we teach non-engineers to use GitHub at Thread
04 January, 2018 – Dan Palmer

At Thread one of our core beliefs is that technology allows for great change. This is important to our product, but it’s also important to how we work internally. Because of this way of working, we try to represent everything in data—products, measurements, styles, suppliers, locations in our…

Engineering culture at Thread
10 November, 2017 – Ben Phillips

Why should you care about the culture at your company? After all, aren’t we just engineers getting together to build something and change the world? Your culture is the machine that builds your product. It’s the values that a group of people share. In this post I’ll discuss culture in a bit more…

Open Source

strict-css-modules-loader
thread/strict-css-modules-loader

    elm-web-components
    thread/elm-web-components

      Jacquard
      prophile/jacquard

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        Careers at Thread

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