Your product catalog is the definitive source of truth for your online presence, especially when managing User-Generated Content (UGC) like ratings and reviews. For Bazaarvoice clients, a meticulously maintained catalog is vital for seamless integration and flawless display. This post explores three key best practices—from precise product naming and consistent category data to optimal naming conventions—that will unlock the full…
Bazaarvoice
https://blog.developer.bazaarvoice.com/ · 110 posts · history since 2012 · active
29 Jan
23 Sept 2025
The Old Way vs. The Reality of Your Customers For years, the gold standard for benchmarking web performance, particularly for Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), has been a mobile device baseline—specifically, a throttled connection and CPU designed to simulate a Moto G4. This approach was established with good intentions: to ensure websites are accessible to […]
This document details how preconnect improves web performance, especially for Bazaarvoice's third-party content, by accelerating connection setups and reducing LCP. Crucially, internal testing confirmed preconnect operations are not counted as API calls, validating a "no count, low cost" model—a key insight for our developer blog.
25 Aug 2025
Discover how Bazaarvoice migrated millions of UGC records from RDS MySQL to AWS Aurora – at scale and with minimal user impact. Learn about the technical challenges, strategies, and outcomes that enabled this ambitious transformation in reliability, performance, and cost efficiency Bazaarvoice ingests and serves millions of user-generated content (UGC) items—reviews, ratings, questions, answers, and […]
28 Oct 2024
Introduction Large language models are fantastic tools for unstructured text, but what if your text doesn’t fit in the context window? Bazaarvoice faced exactly this challenge when building our AI Review Summaries feature: millions of user reviews simply won’t fit into the context window of even newer LLMs and, even if they did, it would […]
6 May 2024
Bazaarvoice has thousands of clients including brands and retailers. Bazaarvoice has billions of records of product catalog and User Generated Content(UGC)from Bazaarvoice clients. When a shopper visits a brand or retailer site/app powered by Bazaarvoice, our APIs are triggered. In 2023,Bazaarvoice UGC APIs recorded peak traffic of over 3+ billion calls per day with zero […]
24 Apr 2024
Bazaarvoice notification system stands as a testament to cutting-edge technology, designed to seamlessly dispatch transactional email messages (post-interaction email or PIE) on behalf of our clients. The heartbeat of our system lies in the constant influx of new content, driven by active content solicitations. Equipped with an array of tools, including email message styling, default […]
18 Mar 2024
I joined Bazaarvoice as a DevOps engineer into the Cloud engineering team in September 2023. It has been a very busy first 4 months learning a lot in terms of technical and soft skills. In this post I have highlighted my key learnings from my start at BV. Communication One of the key takeaways I […]
17 Jan 2024
We all have secrets. Sometimes, these are guilty pleasures that we try to keep hidden, like watching cheesy reality TV or indulging in strange comfort food. We often worry: “How do we keep the secret safe?” “What could happen if someone finds out the secret?” “Who is keeping a secret?” “What happens if we lose […]
20 Dec 2023
The holiday season brings a huge spike in traffic for many companies. While increased traffic is great for retail business, it also puts infrastructure reliability to the test. At times when every second of uptime is of elevated importance, how can engineering teams ensure zero downtime and performant applications? Here are some key strategies and […]
31 Aug 2023
On the racetrack of building ML applications, traditional software development steps are often overtaken. Welcome to the world of MLOps, where unique challenges meet innovative solutions and consistency is king. At Bazaarvoice, training pipelines serve as the backbone of our MLOps strategy. They underpin the reproducibility of our model builds. A glaring gap existed, however, […]
28 Apr 2023
(cover image from ThisisEngineering RAEng) Let’s face it: software is easier to write than maintain. This is why we, as software engineers, prefer to just “rip it out and start over” instead of trying to understand what another developer (or our past self) was thinking. We seem to have collectively forgotten that “programs must be […]
16 Nov 2020
My thoughts and take homes after using Kedro for 6 months in various projects and teams.
7 Aug 2019
Parth Shah and Thai Bui Overview One of the reasons why Hadoop jobs are hard to operate is their inability to provide clear, actionable error diagnostic messages for users. This stems from the fact that Hadoop consists of many interrelated components. When a component fails or behaves poorly, the failure will be cascaded to its […]
21 May 2019
This year’s Bazzarvoice Hackathon coincided with our annual all hands meeting in Austin. Our global offices took time to work on projects that focused on innovation, social integrations, and improved efficiencies. Teams across our departments participated This included: R&D, Product, Customer Services, and Knowledge Base. Hackathon teams took two days to work on their projects. […]
29 Apr 2019
Are you looking to develop your own application on top of the Bazaarvoice Response API? Well, we got something for you. The Response API Demo App is a simple Node-React application which demonstrates how to use Response API in conjunction with our 3-legged OAuth2 API. It is recommended to go through the Developer Portal and […]
18 Jan 2019
Are you working on an agile team? Odds are high that you probably are. Whether you do Scrum/Kanban/lean/extreme, you are all about getting work done with the least resistance possible. Heck, if you are still on Waterfall, you care about that. But how well are you doing? Do you know? Is that something a developer […]
12 Dec 2018
If you’ve followed our blog regularly, you’ve probably read our post on using visual regression testing tools and services to better test your applications’ front end look and feel. If not, take a few minutes to read through our previous post on this topic. Now that you’re up to speed, let’s take what we did […]
4 Oct 2018
A lot of (virtual) ink has been spilled on this blog about automated testing (no, really). This post is another in a series of dives into different automated testing tools and how you can use them to deliver a better, higher-quality web application. Here, we’re going to focus on tools and services specific to ‘visual […]
5 Jun 2018
If you’ve followed our blog for some time, you’ve likely encountered posts detailing how to engage in various kinds of software testing, from performance to data-driven to security and more. This post continues that trend with a focus on testing your site for accessibility. What is Accessibility? If you are unfamiliar with the […]
27 Feb 2018
Internet security is a topic that receives more attention every day. If you’re reading this article in early 2018, issues like Meltdown, Specter and the Equifax breach are no doubt fresh in your mind. Cybersecurity is a massive concern and can seem overwhelming. Where do you start? Where do you go? What do you do […]
6 Feb 2018
Sampling is a Bazaarvoice product that allows consumers to join communities and claim a limited amount of free products. In return consumers provide honest & authentic product reviews for the products they sample. Products are released to consumers for reviews at the same time. This causes a rush to claim these products. This is an […]
2 Jan 2018
Recently, during a holiday lull, I decided to look at another way of modeling event stream data (for the purposes of anomaly detection). I’ve dabbled with (simplistic) event stream models before but this time I decided to take a deeper look at Twitter’s anomaly detection algorithm [1], which in turn is based (more or less) […]
1 Nov 2017
Foreword Our Curations engineering team makes heavy use of serverless architecture. While this typically gives us the benefit of reduced costs, flexibility, and rapid development, it also requires us to ensure that our processes will run within the tight memory and lifecycle constraints of serverless instances. In this article, I will describe an actual case […]
15 Sept 2017
If you’ve followed Bazaarvoice’s R&D blog, you’ve probably read some of our posts on web application performance testing with tools like Jmeter here and here. In this post, we’ll continue our dive into web app performance, this time, focusing on testing front end applications. API Response Time vs App Usability: Application UI testing in general […]
5 Sept 2017
Language: Scala TestTool: Scalatest How did we get here? When systems become reasonably complex, tests must manage cumbersome amounts of data. A test case that may test a small bit of functionality may start to require large amounts of domain knowledge about the system being tested. This is often done through the mock data used […]
5 Jun 2017
A while ago, I published a blog post that presented a tutorial overview of how to use Jmeter for load testing a typical RESTful API. This post builds upon that original post with handy information on some updated reporting features of Jmeter as well a quick dive into how you can better propagate your load […]
24 May 2017
(Always One More Thing…) Who Are We? The Ad Management team here at Bazaarvoice grew out of an incubator team. The goal of our incubator is to quickly iterate on ideas, producing prototypes and “proof of concept” projects to be iterated on if they validate a customer need. The project of interest here generates reports […]
11 May 2017
About six months ago, we shared Why We Hackathon. At Bazaarvoice, we host a company-wide hackathon twice a year, and our next one kicks off this week. My previous post primarily focused on the people and company culture aspects of running a hackathon. In lieu of writing “Synergizing Innovation With Disruptive Hackathons”, this time around […]
26 Apr 2017
Thanks to Bazaarvoice I recently attended an “Advanced React Workshop” put on by React Training and taught by Ryan Florence, one of the creators of React Router. Ryan was an engaging teacher and the workshop was filled with memorable quotes. Here are some highlights: The great conundrum of accessibility is that learning it is not […]
21 Feb 2017
This past October I participated in an awesome Open Source event called “Hacktoberfest”, sponsored by Digital Ocean and GitHub. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of Open Source where developers are encouraged to contribute to the community. Participation is easy: Pull requests can be made in any GitHub-hosted repositories/projects. A contribution can be anything—fixing bugs, creating […]
27 Jan 2017
So many folks are wonder what they need to do to make a career of User Experience Design. As someone who interviewed many designers before, I’d say the only gate between you and a career in UX that really matters is your portfolio. Tech moves too fast and is too competitive to worry about tenure […]
23 Jan 2017
At Bazaarvoice, we’re big fans of cloud. Real big. We’re also fans of DevOps. There’s been a lot of discussion over the past several years about “What is DevOps?” Usually, this term is used to describe Systems Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers (sometimes called Infrastructure Engineers, Systems Engineers, Operations Engineers or, in the most unfortunate […]
3 Jan 2017
This Bazaarvoice blog entry is co-authored by Tanvir Pathan as part of a Bazaarvoice internship project on the Bazaarvoice Mobile Team. Automated testing of native mobile applications has long been a pain point in the world of mobile app development. If you are creating and distributing apps or open source SDKs across two or more major platforms […]
16 Dec 2016
Pattern libraries sometimes fall short of helping enterprise teams build different products the same way. These palettes of components (toolbars, pop-ins) and patterns (searching, navigating) can be assembled into any number of UIs, leading to too many right answers. While the public pattern libraries like Google Material must accommodate countless unimagined applications, our private libraries […]
10 Nov 2016
A while ago, I published a post on this blog about how to perform retrospectives for development teams who proscribe to Kanban and/or the agile development process. You can read that post here: Don’t Look Back in Anger I’ve received a lot of feedback on that blog post – enough that I thought I’d follow up […]
4 Nov 2016
In the previous blog post I introduced our stripe-ctf-2-vm, a self-contained capture the flag puzzle ladder in one vm. In this post, I’d like to talk about how we used the vm to introduce the security mindset to our developers here at Bazaarvoice. One of the tenets in R&D is to responsibly “fail fast, win […]
27 Oct 2016
Hey you there, did you know that forty percent of all data breaches are due to web application vulnerabilities? That means the very software your team is building is likely to be the vector to getting your data pwnd. Still feeling skeptical? You should google Heartland’s 2008 breach, eBay’s XSS vulnerability, or Time Warner’s password […]
17 Oct 2016
This year Bazaarvoice sponsored CSSConf 2016 in beautiful Boston, MA, USA and I was able to attend! Here are my three top takeaways from CSSConf 2016: Flexy Flexy Flexbox A little over a year ago, our application team wasn’t sure how “stable” Flexbox or its spec were: there was already an old syntax, a new syntax, […]
17 Aug 2016
Over the last 20 years of my career, I have worked with a lot of different people and lot of different teams. Some were very successful, and some were not. I am always trying to understand what makes successful people tick, and what I can do differently to be more successful. Your Energy The one […]
10 Aug 2016
As the summer comes to an end, so do the internships for numerous university students here at Bazaarvoice. This past week, the interns were given an opportunity to present a summary of their accomplishments. This afternoon of presentations, known as the Bazaarvoice “Intern Demo Day”, highlighted the various achievements throughout the company, not just in […]
29 Jul 2016
Retrospective – This term can elicit a negative response in people in the software development industry (verbally and physically). After all, it is a bit of a loaded term. Looking back can be painful especially since that usually means looking back at mistakes, missteps and decisions we might want to take back. I have worked […]
26 Jul 2016
The Bazaarvoice headquarters hosted the July 20th HackerX event in Austin, Texas. The event featured not only Bazaarvoice, but also included Facebook, Amazon, and Indeed. 70+ engineers participated in onsite interviews and networking. HackerX commented that “this was one of the most successful events” they have ever seen. Gary Allison, Executive Vice President of Engineering, […]
15 Jul 2016
Bazaarvoice’s Small Web App Technologies (SWAT) team is pleased to announce that we are open sourcing swat-proxy – a tool to inject applications onto third-party webpages. In third-party web application development it is difficult to be certain how our applications will look and behave on a client’s webpage until they are implemented. Any number of things could interfere – including…
28 Jun 2016
If you are part of an agile, or lean, or kanban development team, you probably do or have done demos at one point. Some people call them “end of sprint” demos. Some people call them “stakeholder” demos. We are pretty informal and irreverent about it at Bazaarvoice, and we just call them “demos” because giving […]
21 Jun 2016
Divide and Conquer As Engineers, we often like nice clean solutions that don’t carry along what we like to call technical debt. Technical debt literally is stuff that we have to go back to fix/rewrite later or that requires significant ongoing maintenance effort. In a perfect world, we fire up the the new platform and […]
10 Jun 2016
At Bazaarvoice, we’ve pulled off an incredible feat, one that is such an enormous task that I’ve seen other companies hesitate to take on. We’ve learned a lot along the way and I wanted to share some of these experiences and lessons in hopes they may benefit others facing similar decisions. The Beginning Our original […]
19 May 2016
What is Load Testing and Why Should I Care? Somewhere between the disciplines of Dev Operations, Database Management, Software Design and Testing, there’s a Venn diagram where at its crunchy, peanut-butter filled center lies the discipline of performance testing. Herein lies the performant (sic) Which is to say, professional performance testers have a very specific […]
27 Apr 2016
Today we are announcing an important change to our Conversations API service: On April 30, 2017 service will end for Conversations API versions 5.2 and 5.3 By deprecating older versions of our API service, we can refocus our energies on the current and future API services, which we feel offer the most benefits to our […]
28 Mar 2016
More and more companies and industries are grappling with the challenges of extracting value from large amounts of data. Data scientists, the people whose job it is to overcome these challenges, are becoming more prominent, yet what it is they do, and how they’re different than software engineers, is still a mystery to a lot of people. The […]
24 Dec 2015
Preparing for the Holiday season is a year round task for all of us here at Bazaarvoice. This year we saw many retailers extending their seasonal in-store specials to their websites as well. We also saw retailers going as far as closing physical stores on Thanksgiving (Nordstrom, Costco, Home Depot, etc.) and Black Friday (REI). Regardless […]
4 Sept 2015
Every year Bazaarvoice R&D throws BVIO, an internal technical conference followed by a two-day hackathon. These conferences are an opportunity for us to focus on unlocking the power of our network, data, APIs, and platforms as well as have some fun in the process. We invite keynote speakers from within BV, from companies who use […]
22 May 2015
In this blog post David Gee, a Senior Product Manager on our Product team, discusses challenges to building and maintaining technical partnerships between organizations as well as provides advice on how to overcome those challenges. Every company comes to a point, early or late, where it realizes that it must partner with other companies to […]
1 May 2015
When I started on the Firebird team at Bazaarvoice, I was happy to learn that they host their code on GitHub and review and land changes via pull requests. I was less happy to learn that they merged pull requests with the big green button. I was able to convince the team to try out a new, rebase-oriented, workflow […]
24 Apr 2015
One of the many challenges of software testing has always been cross-browser testing. Despite the web’s overall move to more standards compliant browser platforms, we still struggle with the fact that sometimes certain CSS values or certain JavaScript operations don’t translate well in some browsers (cough, cough IE 8). In this post, I’m going to […]
17 Apr 2015
One of the chief promises of the cloud is fast scalability, but what good is snappy scalability without load prediction to match? How many teams out there are still manually switching group sizes when load spikes? If you would like to make your Amazon EC2 scaling more predictive, less reactive and hopefully less expensive it is […]
10 Apr 2015
At Bazaarvoice we use Dropwizard for a lot of our java based SOA services. Recently I upgraded our Dropwizard dependency from 0.6 to the newer 0.7 version on a few different services. Based on this experience I have some observations that might help any other developers attempting to do the same thing. Package Name Change […]
9 Apr 2015
This blog post only applies to the Conversations API and does not apply to any other Bazaarvoice product. You are able to identify the Bazaarvoice Conversations API by the following: Path includes ‘data’: http://api.bazaarvoice.com/data/reviews.json? Code related to the Bazaarvoice Hosted Display does not need modification. It can be identified by the following: References ‘bvapi.js’: http://display.ugc.bazaarvoice.com/static/ClientName/en_US/bvapi.js […]
26 Mar 2015
This post continues the discussion from Automated Product Matching, Part I: Challenges. System First, Algorithm Second With each design iteration, I gradually came to appreciate how important it was to have an overall matching system that was well designed. The quality of the matching algorithm did not matter if its output was going to be […]
23 Mar 2015
A distributed data system consisting of several nodes is said to be fully consistent when all nodes have the same state of the data they own. So, if record A is in State S on one node, then we know that it is in the same state in all its replicas and data centers. Full […]
13 Mar 2015
Bazaarvoice’s flagship product is a platform for our clients to accept, display and manage consumer generated content (CGC) on their web sites. CGC includes reviews, ratings, images, videos, social network content, etc. Over the last few years, syndicating CGC from one site to another has become increasingly important to our customers. When a user submits […]
6 Mar 2015
A couple of years ago, my former colleague Alex Sexton wrote about the techniques that we use at Bazaarvoice to deploy client-side JavaScript applications and then load those applications in a browser. Alex went into great detail, and it’s a good, if long, read. The core idea, though, is pretty simple: an application is bootstrapped […]
20 Feb 2015
Every holiday season, the virtual doors of your favorite retailer are blown open by a torrent of shoppers who are eager to find the best deal, whether they’re looking for a Turbo Man action figure or a ludicrously discounted 4K flat screen. This series focuses on our Big Data analytics platform, which is used to learn more […]
14 Jun 2014
Check out Bazaarvoice IO 2014 Technical Conference keynote speaker, Theo Schlossnagle, @postwait, CEO of Circonus discussing The Rise of the Machines and Data PTSD
Check out Bazaarvoice IO 2014 Technical Conference keynote speaker Otis Gospodnetic, @otisg, Founder of Sematext, Committer on Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Mahout, OpenRelevance, and author of Lucene in Action discussing the Open Source Search Evolution
Check out Bazaarvoice IO 2014 Technical Conference Keynote speaker Bob Metcalfe, @BobMetcalfe, Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas, discussing Metcalfe’s Law After 40 Years of Ethernet
Check out Bazaarvoice IO 2014 Technical Conference keynote speaker Greg Brockman, @thegdb, CTO of Stripe and designer of the Stripe CTF contests discussing how they scaled Stripe from 4 to 94 employees
11 Apr 2014
Cloudformation is a powerful tool for building large, coordinated clusters of AWS resources. It has a sophisticated API, capable of supporting many different enterprise use-cases and scaling to thousands of stacks and resources. However, there is a downside: the JSON interface for specifying a stack can be cumbersome to manipulate, especially as your organization grows […]
Looks like everyone had a blast at bv.io this year! Thank yous go out to the conference speakers and hackathon participants for making this year outstanding. Here are some tweets and images from the conference: RT @bazaarbrett: Hackathon is kicking off, very glad to be here! #bvhackathon pic.twitter.com/q8dnfqlQxh — Bazaarvoice (@Bazaarvoice) April 2, 2014 https://twitter.com/bentonporter/status/451362916181090304 […]
8 Nov 2013
As a developer I’ve used a variety of APIs and as a Developer Advocate at Bazaarvoice I help developers use our APIs. As a result I am keenly aware of the importance of good tools and of using the right tool for the right job. The right tool can save you time and frustration. With […]
17 Oct 2013
Every year Bazaarvoice holds an internal technical conference for our engineers. Each conference has a theme and as a part of these conferences we invite noted experts in fields related to the theme to give presentations. The latest conference was themed “unlocking the power of our data.” You can read more about it here. Nick […]
11 Oct 2013
Some of y’all may have caught our previous blog post announcing the release of our Java JSON transformation library, Jolt. Jolt is a powerful tool that can accomplish a variety of useful transformations on JSON data, and even chain multiple transformations together. Jolt has additional functionality that is useful for working with JSON including the […]
3 Oct 2013
Every year Bazaarvoice holds an internal technical conference for our engineers. Each conference has a theme and as a part of these conferences we invite noted experts in fields related to the theme to give presentations. The latest conference was themed “unlocking the power of our data.” You can read more about it here. In […]
26 Sept 2013
Every year Bazaarvoice holds an internal technical conference for our engineers. Each conference has a theme and as a part of these conferences we invite noted experts in fields related to the theme to give presentations. The latest conferences was themed “unlocking the power of our data.” You can read more about it here. The […]
18 Sept 2013
An all too familiar scenario Imagine you’re a developer working for Widgets n’More. The marketing team just came up with a new cross platform social media promotion. It’s going to involve collecting user generated content in the form of ratings and reviews. As luck would have it you remember your friend on the Ecom Team […]
11 Sept 2013
(This post is by Devin Carr, one of our Summer 2013 interns.) Working as a Developer Advocate intern on the Bazaarvoice Developer Relations team has been a great learning opportunity. At the beginning of the Summer I discussed with my mentors, Chas Peacock and Frederick Feibel, what I wanted to learn while interning. We decided […]
29 Aug 2013
As part of our internal BV I/O conference we’ve previously profiled on the blog, we had Adrian Cockroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix, come give us an overview of a lot of Netflix’s architecture as well as information on their multitude of open source projects and the ways Netflix is engaging the community to contribute. He […]
23 Aug 2013
Hi, my name is Ralph Pina, I am a Summer ’13 intern and UT-Austin Computer Science student. During this summer I had the privilege of working with another intern, Devin Carr, on Bazaarvoice’s .NET SDK for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 Store apps. Our goal was to provide convenient access to our Conversations API […]
21 Aug 2013
The Bazaarvoice Mobile Team is happy to announce our newest mobile SDK for Windows Phone 8. It is a .NET SDK that supports Windows Phone 8 as well as Windows 8 Store apps. This will add to our list of current open-source mobile SDKs for iOS, Android and Appcelerator Titanium. The SDK will allow developers […]
14 Aug 2013
The Bazaarvoice Platform Infrastructure Team recently open sourced project Lassie. Lassie is a Java library that can manipulate the new DataDog screenboards. The Lassie library can create, get, update, and delete the DataDog screenboards via the REST API. We use DataDog across various teams to collect metrics at both a system-wide and application level to give […]
12 Aug 2013
We’ll soon be giving our Developer Portal some love in the way of functionality and style updates. To facilitate this, we’ll be taking the portal offline for approximately 6 hours on Thursday, August 15th; the estimated times are listed in a few timezones below: Timezone Start date/time End date/time UTC Thursday, August 15, 2:00 AM […]
8 Aug 2013
Every year at Bazaarvoice we bring on a new class of Summer interns and put them to work creating innovative (and educational) projects. At the beginning of the Summer interns choose from a list of projects and teams that interest them. From there they are embedded in a team where they spend the rest of […]
31 Jul 2013
What do you get when you lock 100+ engineers, product managers, designers and other techies in a building for 2 days and ask them to come up with new and creative ways to “unlock the power of our data”? Well, I could tell you, but then I would have to… yeah that’s top secret awesome […]
11 Jul 2013
It has not been long since the holy war between SQL and NoSQL database technologies faded, and now we see a new contender, NewSQL, rising. What is it? Will it cause another round of the war? Recently at Bazaarvoice we hosted an informational session on VoltDB, one of the better known NewSQL solutions, with several engineers and […]
1 Jul 2013
At Bazaarvoice, we strongly believe that our people are our most important asset. We hire extremely smart and passionate people, let them loose on complex problems, and watch all the amazing things they create. We had another opportunity to see that innovation engine in full effect last week at our internal technical conference and 2 […]
28 Jun 2013
We are pleased to announce a new open source contribution, a Java based JSON to JSON transformation tool named Jolt. Jolt grew out of a BV Platform API project to migrate the backend from Solr/MySql to Cassandra/ElasticSearch. As such, we were going to be doing a lot of data transformations from the new ElasticSearch JSON […]
22 Jun 2013
Greetings all! In the world of SaaS, wiser men than I have referred to Operations as the “Secret Sauce” that distinguishes you from your competition. As manager of one of our DevOps teams, I wanted to talk to you about how Bazaarvoice uses the cloud and how we engineer our systems for maximum reliability. You […]
18 Jun 2013
In late May the Bazaarvoice team was delighted to speak again as a part of Database Month in New York City, and we were excited to speak about our recent work with Cassandra & Elastic Search. We discussed our goals for replacing the Bazaarvoice data infrastructure, as well as our hopes for the new system, […]
30 May 2013
Last summer I was given an internship opportunity in the R&D department of Bazaarvoice as a software engineer. Having only finished my freshman year in college, I had no idea what to expect from a tech company of this size. I would have never guessed that on my first day I would be handed a […]
1 Mar 2013
Welcome to the Mashery-powered Bazaarvoice Developer portal. We strive to give you the tools you need to develop cutting-edge applications on the Bazaarvoice platform. Some changes you’ll notice: You no longer have to login to see documentation. Just click the Expand icon () to drill down to the information you need. If you want to […]
8 Feb 2013
We are pleased to announce that on March 1, 2013, we are moving our developer portal hosting to Mashery. What does this mean to you, our developer community: None of your existing API keys will be affected by this transition. They will continue to work without interruption. You no longer need to log in to […]
15 Jan 2013
We are pleased to announce that the following functionality has been developed for version 5.4: Submission forms pre-filled for non-anonymous users Full text search on all UGC and on includes Product family queries Photo upload accepts URLs Brightcove Smart Player Javascript integration Story rating field exposed in the response Special product attributes exposed in the response […]
29 Sept 2012
Bazaarvoice R&D had a great year of intensive university recruiting with 12 interns joining our teams last summer and working side-by-side with the developers on our products. We have further expanded the program this year to accommodate two co-op positions for students from the University of Waterloo. The influx of fresh ideas and additional energy […]
14 Sept 2012
Here at Bazaarvoice, we’re constantly focused on improving the user experience for our products. From the initial email invitation, to the submission form, to the way in which reviews are presented, we want to make sure that our interfaces are as flexible and intuitive as possible. Part of my job on the mobile team at […]
4 Sept 2012
Stripe (https://stripe.com/) held their second capture the flag event, this time the CTF was dedicated to web-based vulnerabilities and exploits. As a new Security Engineer here at BV the timing of this was perfect. It allowed me to use it as a vehicle for awareness and to ramp up curiosity, interest and even excitement for […]
4 Aug 2012
We are pleased to announce that the following functionality has been developed for version 5.3: Hosted authentication – email Feedback submission for comments RatingDistribution (Histogram data) and SecondaryRatingsAverages added to review statistics Time zone changed to UTC Error codes added to form errors Syndication attribution on reviews More detailed information on each of these items […]
2 Jun 2012
We are pleased to announce that the following functionality has been developed for version 5.2: Helpfulness and inappropriate content feedback submission enabled ContentLocale no longer filtered implicitly by default Product and category attributes populated as a map Hosted video submission and display updated Inline ratings data exposed for product-based review statistics More detailed information on […]
4 May 2012
We recently delivered this presentation titled “How to Scale Big on MySQL? Break a Few Rules!” as part of Database Week here in New York City. The presentation is a lighthearted, and informative take on how Bazaarvoice Engineering has been able to take MySQL to billions of requests per month. The slides and video are […]
19 Apr 2012
Over time, even technologies that are tried and true begin to show their age. This is especially true for data stores as the shear amount of data explodes and site traffic increases. Because of this, we are continually working with new technologies to determine whether they have a place in our primary stack. To that […]
12 Apr 2012
Bazaarvoice is a third-party application provider. We have a growing number of applications running on our own domain, but our core business is providing user-generated content applications and widgets that are hosted by us, but run on our clients’ webpages. Scaling an application platform of our size certainly has its challenges at the data layer. […]
5 Apr 2012
We recently released our new Bazaarvoice Platform API. This is a new RESTful API that allows access to much more data and provides responses in XML and JSON. We are really excited to see the types of applications our clients will be building on the API. For a quick introduction to the API, we created […]
27 Mar 2012
Clients like the Home Depot are using ideas from our Inspiration Gallery to find innovative ways to show off their user-generated content (UGC) and demonstrate the importance of listening to their customers. The following image is taken from a Home Depot Store Managers meeting which had all store managers as well as suppliers in attendance. […]
22 Mar 2012
Update: It looks like there was a conflict with the name Amber with another JavaScript project, so the SproutCore folks have graciously decided to change their name to Ember.js so as not to be in conflict. Check out the details at Yehuda’s blog. The following is the original blog post: Yehuda Katz has just officially […]
Daniel Marcotte is one of the top developers on our latest product offering, Customer Intelligence (CI). He spent quite a bit of time evaluating SproutCore 2.0 for the complex user interface requirements of CI, helping to work out some of the kinks in the product as it moved toward beta. Daniel has recently moved to […]
14 Mar 2012
This is is the second of a two-part article that outlines how we used a various set of tools to improve our page load performance. If you haven’t read part 1, go ahead and give it a read before continuing. Tactics We opted to not use our normal staging environment for this project, since our […]
9 Mar 2012
Huge opportunity for impact. A sense of ownership. Collaboration with people across every function in the organization. An understanding of the big picture and a real opportunity to shape the future. These are some of the best and most exciting qualities of working at a software start-up. In my personal experience, working at both a […]
15 Feb 2012
We are pleased to announce that the following functionality has been developed for version 5.1: ReviewStats updated Moderator Codes for user-generated content (UGC) exposed Wildcard character in ContentLocale filter enabled IP address in Content Display exposed API key creation and management added to the client portal More detailed information on each of these items is […]
8 Feb 2012
On December 3rd and 4th Bazaarvoice was the lead sponsor on an event in Austin called Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), a coordinated worldwide hackathon for social good. The event started Friday night with a reception for all of the hackers at the Volstead Lounge where over over 60 people celebrated, heard a few quick […]
Debugging performance issues is hard. Debugging end-user performance issues from a distributed production software stack is even harder, especially if you are the 3rd-party service provider for one of your clients that actually is in control of how your code is integrated into their site. There are lots of articles on the web regarding what […]
20 Jan 2012
BBQ is a religion in Austin. Everyone has their opinion on who serves up the best BBQ. Debates between people defending their choices have been known to last into the wee hours of the night. Friendships have been ruined, and neighbors turned into enemies (okay, I might have made that last bit up…but you get […]