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Building The Conversation

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A Tale of Performance Testing

At The Conversation we’ve recently been working hard at migrating one of our web applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The exact architecture we’re running on AWS is a whole blog post in itself, but…
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Mea culpa: Lessons learned from firefighting

Background On the morning of Tuesday, May 23 there was a mood of excitement within the Australian team of The Conversation as donations from generous supporters began to roll in. The annual appeal for…

Monitoring Build Times: Maintaining our Fast feedback Loop

The Conversation launched over six years ago and our continuous integration infrastructure has evolved over that time. For the first few years we ran happily ran Jenkins on a single physical server. Our…

Evolving Agile practices to support a distributed team

In the beginning Back in June 2015 when I joined The Conversation’s development team, I was the first remote member. I recall spending the first week in the Melbourne office before returning to my home…

Finding flow: learning Ruby on the job

I’d graduated from university with a degree I loved but the prospect of finding a stimulating job, let alone a career, was slim. I wasn’t sure where my life was leading. I was stuck. This podcast on design…
Some serious competition happens here.

How we built an Arduino-powered ping pong scoreboard

At The Conversation, we take table tennis very seriously. After setting up a new ping pong table, and wanting to learn how to use an Arduino, I had a bit of time to build a scoreboard. An Arduino is a…

Converting HTML to Markdown with Upmark

Here at The Conversation we run a Job Board that requires parsing a whole bunch of job descriptions in HTML and converting them to Markdown. When we originally built the Job Board we looked around for…

Our i18n Workflow

The Conversation was launched in 2011 in partnership with Australian universities. Later on, the platform was extended to support partnerships with institutions in the UK, USA and Africa. So far, for all…

Welcome Back!

In the early days of The Conversation, the technical team published a series of blog posts that gave some insights into the challenges they faced. As any blogger knows, the major challenge of such an endeavour…