Posts about Engineering

Introducing 2 Open Source Project Management Tools for Modern Development Teams

Introducing 2 Open Source Project Management Tools for Modern Development Teams

Here at Disqus, we use Trello as our project management tool of choice. Trello lets us plan out our projects in ways that make sense to both developers and product managers. Trello’s Power-Ups library let us integrate Trello with our other existing tools so that they can work seamlessly together. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing two internal tools our team uses to get more done with Trello.
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The Winter 2018 Disqus HackWeek Recap

The Winter 2018 Disqus HackWeek Recap

To kick off the new year, Disqus hosted a hackathon recently where teams worked on various projects to explore new ideas, solve interesting problems, and build something cool. At the end of the week, teams demoed their projects to the company who voted for their favorites. Here are four of the most interesting projects that came out of the hackathon. Let us know what you think in the comments below! If you missed the recap of our last HackWeek, visit this blog post here to learn more.
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Poll: What is Your Favorite Disqus Hackweek Project?

Poll: What is Your Favorite Disqus Hackweek Project?

Over the summer we had our annual Disqus Hackweek. We already wrote about the projects that our team hacked away about. Now we want to hear from you:
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Protecting Users' Privacy on Disqus

Protecting Users' Privacy on Disqus

Here at Disqus, we love our users. We also respect our users and their privacy too. Over the years, we’ve introduced stronger privacy controls such as honoring the Do Not Track setting in browsers, implementing Content Security Policy headers to protect you from any possible XSS attacks, and supporting a solution for loading Disqus over HTTPS. Our Home and moderation interfaces are already HTTPS-only, and now we are proud to announce that our commenting system, Engage, is also HTTPS-only.
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Disqus hacks the roadmap: June 2016 Recap

Disqus hacks the roadmap: June 2016 Recap

Last month, we hosted an internal two-day hackathon at Disqus HQ. Unlike your typical anything-goes hackathon, “Hack the Roadmap”—as we dubbed it—aimed to enable anyone at Disqus to explore projects and ideas that may be immediately relevant or considered in our future roadmap.
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The paper plane proof: our uplifting story of client-side JavaScript bucketing

The paper plane proof: our uplifting story of client-side JavaScript bucketing

Contributors: Ernest Wong, Charles Covey-Brandt, and Michael Maltese
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A love affair with Cassandra

A love affair with Cassandra

Cassandra is a highly scalable distributed database that we use in a variety of applications. It powers such things as loading the Disqus comment system, to our real-time Promoted Discovery product. We love the tool and have decided to help users of Cassandra get better connected to the community by hosting the Datastax Cassandra SF Users meetup at Disqus HQ.
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Disqus Hackathon

Disqus Hackathon

In office team dinner during the Hackathon.
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Scaling Django to 8 Billion Page Views

Scaling Django to 8 Billion Page Views

As we’re approaching 8 billion page views per month and 45k requests per second, we’ve learned a couple things about delivering comments to a lot of different people. Disqus is very well known for using Django for almost all of our web traffic, and that continues to be a thing today. As with any web framework, there are inherent trade-offs: rapid development vs performance, familiarity for new developers vs something custom, etc. Disqus likes to lean towards rapid development and familiarity over performance, and something fine tuned for our exact needs.
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Trying out this Go thing...

Trying out this Go thing...

Last Thursday, May 16th, we shipped our first Go project into production.
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Making Disqus faster

Making Disqus faster

Hello. I am Anton Kovalyov, I work as a software engineer here at Disqus and this blog post is about one project I was working on. It extracts all the static parts out of our embeddable code which makes our widget much faster than it is now. We are still testing this update but you already can try it out. For more details on the project and how to enable it for your website, continue reading.
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