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.

Contributors: Ernest Wong, Charles Covey-Brandt, and Michael Maltese

It's like 10:30 pm and I'm still in the office.

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.

In office team dinner during the Hackathon.

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.

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

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.