In early 2023, Slack faced a foundational challenge: serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at enterprise scale with the security, reliability, and performance our customers expect. Over three years, we evolved from basic infrastructure to orchestrating a sophisticated multi-cloud architecture. We didn’t just want shiny new models; we needed a system resilient to regional outages and…
#backend
16 posts
28 May
19 Mar
Introduction 🔔 At Slack, notifications are how teams stay in the loop, but they can also become overwhelming when not designed with intention. Our goal was to make staying informed feel effortless. We set out to rebuild one of Slack’s most complicated systems from the ground up by bringing calm, consistency, and clarity to the…
22 Oct 2025
When I joined Medium , it was because I still believe in the internet as a place for ideas. Not noise, not outrage, but content that connects people through shared curiosity. Medium’s mission is to deepen understanding and spread ideas that matter. We’re building the best place for reading and writing online: A space that rewards clarity, authenticity, and craft…
28 Jan 2025
Qualitative comparison of image embedding models to power a scalable similar-image replacement system for Canva designs.
10 Dec 2024
How Canva uses graph traversal to handle the complexity of getting print orders to our customers.
18 Jan 2024
Most of Slack runs on a monolithic service simply called “The Webapp”. It’s big – hundreds of developers create hundreds of changes every week. Deploying at this scale is a unique challenge. When people talk about continuous deployment, they’re often thinking about deploying to systems as soon as changes are ready. They talk about microservices…
28 Nov 2023
Slack Connect, AKA shared channels, allows communication between different Slack workspaces, via channels shared by participating organizations. Slack Connect has existed for a few years now, and the sheer volume of channels and external connections has increased significantly since the launch. The increased volume introduced scaling problems, but also highlighted that not all external connections…
19 May 2022
Let’s start with a beautiful quote, which also can act as a great summary of what I want to share: “If you need a readme.md explaining how to build a project, you already failed” – Eelco Dolstra With this in mind, try to think back if you ever tried to follow along in a tutorial […]
3 May 2019
We all love reading about the latest software developments trends and buzzwords but they can often turn out to be just that, buzzwords. For us at Small Improvements, Domain Driven Design (DDD) has really lived up to it’s own hype though and helped us build better software, faster and fewer bugs to boot. Do we have […]
5 Oct 2017
It was a couple of months or so ago when I came across this conference called FullStack Fest, skimming through the agenda, I was immediately intrigued and thought “I’ve got to check this out”. The coolest bit? The conference was taking part in the beautiful city of Barcelona. September finally came around, and just as […]
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 […]
1 Nov 2016
Like a lot of people at Small Improvements I’m fascinated by functional programming. For a while I’ve been thinking about cleaning up a little in our codebase, mainly the backend which is written in Java. I have known for ages that Haskell is really good with abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and was playing with the thought of creating a Haskell…
12 Sept 2016
It’s no secret that we at Small Improvements love to use cutting edge technologies for our application. On the client side, there’s no limit, that’s why we’re rapidly transitioning to React. In the backend, we’re pushing the limits too, but we’re currently bound by what the App Engine has to offer. The main grievance for us is that […]
11 Oct 2015
In course of the DevOpsDays 2015 in Berlin, Small Improvements is going to host a Docker meetup with John Willis of Docker Inc on October 26th! John’s presentation covers the current state of the DevOps movement as presented by one of the original “Core Organizers” of the movement. The presentation will look at some of the taxonomies that have been…
9 Apr 2015
Definition Kubernetes – κυβερνήτης • (kyvernítis) m governor (leader of a region or state) (nautical) captain, skipper pilot (of an aircraft) Motivation We recently moved to a new office and discovered that one of our bare metal Continuous Integration build agents didn’t survive the move. Since other developers were already unhappy with the fact, that the […]
24 Feb 2015
We conducted our 3rd SI Hackathon on Feb 19th to Feb 20th. This is one of the hackathon results. Background My previous Hackathon project was way too ambitious, so I decided to pick something easier this time, which would also help reduce our support load a bit. A frequent pain point is that client admins […]