Our Developer Ethos
Over the years, the Shutterstock development team has grown from two people to almost twenty today. We’ve tried to maintain a consistent development culture during that time, because it provides a...
View ArticleWhy Perl?
At Shutterstock we use Perl, and have built our industry-leading website using a Perl and open source stack. Here’s some reasons we love Perl and why developers feel fanatical about Perl! Perl...
View ArticleFeersum in the Wild: Perl’s Evented Web Server
We use open source software in just about every form it takes: programming languages, operating systems, web servers, databases… even firewalls. We try to release some of our own software, too. Open...
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Introducing Rickshaw: A JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time...
We’re happy to share a project we’ve been working on that helps us see into our data. It’s a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs, called Rickshaw. At Shutterstock we use...
View ArticlePerl: When DWIM Doesn’t
We’ve written in the past of our love for Perl. We meant it. But in any loving relationship, there will also be hard parts and unpleasant surprises. These are some tales of unpleasant surprises....
View ArticleIf It’s Not on Prod, It Doesn’t Count: The Value of Frequent Releases
At Shutterstock, we like to release code. A lot. We do it about 60 times per week. Frequent code releases have become somewhat of a mantra among today’s fast-moving startups, but the value they bring...
View ArticleSimplifying the build, test, and run cycle with Rock
At Shutterstock we have over 50 sites and services running in production, across thousands of VMs, in a range of languages — mostly Perl, Ruby, Node, and PHP. Supporting such a variety of languages...
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Test All the (Network) Things
Our engineering team supports many different sites, including the Shutterstock photo site, the Shutterstock footage site, the Shutterstock contributor site, Bigstock, Offset, and Skillfeed. All these...
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Adventures in API Usability
Shutterstock developers pay a lot of attention to the user experience of our website. We have a fleet of User Experience experts who help make sure the error states our web application shows to...
View ArticleOur Guide to Building RESTful Services
A few years ago, we began a fun and challenging journey to break a large, monolithic codebase into a set of isolated, independent REST services. This effort has already yielded a ton of value in...
View ArticleInterview with a CodeRage Finalist: Dave K and Projector
Every quarter, the tech team at Shutterstock holds CodeRage, a 24-hour hackathon where we’re encouraged to work on any project that can bring value to the company. This quarter, one of the winning...
View ArticleWhen a Space Is Not Just a Space
During a recent email exchange with our search team, Nick Patch, our resident Unicode expert, offered the following advice for a chunk of Java code used to detect Japanese characters: >...
View ArticleThe Secret to Shutterstock Tech Teams
Being fast and nimble is important to us at Shutterstock, and one way we accomplish this is by working in small teams. This approach has yielded tremendous benefits over the years, but it comes with...
View ArticleStop Using One Language
In any technology company one of the fundamental aspects of its identity is the technology stack, and programming language that it’s built on. This is what defines types of tools that are fair game,...
View Article12 Questions To Ask About PCI
Organizations either breeze through or struggle with PCI certification. The struggle parallels to a fight against zombies. You must stay on your toes. Once they start coming towards you they don’t stop...
View ArticleSwift: An Introduction to the Language
There was a huge amount of interest in Swift after it was introduced by Apple earlier this year. Not only were iOS engineers at Shutterstock learning everything they could about the new and evolving...
View ArticleBuilding your own network automation
There’s an important piece of infrastructure lacking the appropriate level of automation. In fact, without this part you are not connected to the Internet. I’m talking about the network hardware that...
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Let’s Get Terminal: An Inside Look at Q1 CodeRage
Last week we wrapped up our first quarter CodeRage, a 24-hour hackathon dedicated to our engineers to build exciting and innovative products. The idea of CodeRage is to build something new and...
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How to build quality into your software development workflow
Suppose you’re a startup looking to grow into a mid-sized tech company — somewhere between 30 and 100 engineers. Hiring is happening fast, and the amount of code you’re churning out is growing fast as...
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Functional Programming in JavaScript
The current state of web development is best characterized not only by the myriad of problems developers face, but also by the vast number of ways we can go about solving those problems. But are they...
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