Skroutz Engineering

What We Learned at BrightonSEO This Year.

Building a scalable data platform without blocking product development using a hybrid on-premises and cloud approach.

At Skroutz, debugging issues in production as soon as possible is crucial to minimizing downtime and ensuring a smooth experience for our users. Traditionally, investigating incidents or bugs in HTTP requests involved reproducing the issue in the development environment by adding breakpoints (e.g binding.pry).

Our codebase is over 10 years old. Like every other project that started at that period, it adopted Model View Presenter as its architecture. Over the years, both the app and the team grew. This created a need to shift to an architecture resembling ‘clean architecture’. At that point, MVP became the presentation pattern of the app. A decision that served us well all these years.

What’s the excitement about one screen being the ultimate solution? Presenting the new Listing Screen, an update to the legacy version that now supports sections, ready to transform how we manage listings in our app. The Home Screen of the Android Skroutz app already uses sections, setting the stage for a dynamic user experience. This article will explore the challenges we encountered during the implementation process, the solutions we developed, and how we successfully executed a smooth release.

In the last few years the android team has grown significantly and with that so did our codebase. We are at a state that the lack of documentation has become an issue but not for what you might think. Documenting a class as to how it works is not as essential as making the same class easy to discover!

At Skroutz, every product engineer belongs both to a product team and a chapter. A product team contains people from all crafts and is responsible in delivering new features to our users. A chapter on the other hand contains only engineers of a certain craft and is responsible for all technical aspects of a project.

A tricky bug during a key redesign in fashion pages led us down an engineering rabbit hole in an effort to achieve an excellent user experience.

A symbiotic relationship for continuous, real-time monitoring and improving user experience on a large scale application with millions of users.

How we contribute to the evolution of Hotwire

Streamlining the Rails upgrade process.

Take advantage of Hotwire features to achieve a lazy loading experience without boilerplate code

A summary of the SEO values that helped Skroutz.gr΄s significant growth.

Providing a more user friendly UI while waiting for your data to be fetched

How to analyze and classify more than 80,000 products / day

How a failing rsync run led to the discovery of a long-standing bug in the Linux TCP implementation.

Α technical post about Rendering Performance of Skroutz.gr.

How to keep your business processes lean and efficient

Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Engineering Interview Process

How we transitioned from semi-annual feedback meetings to a continuous performance management framework.

How we optimized our Crawl Budget by removing 72% of Skroutz indexed URLs while growing to 30M sessions/month.

We were at Agile Summit 2019 in Athens here are our notes.

Debian Buster made our VMs boot up in over 5 minutes. That's how we fixed it.

How we built a robust and scalable pipeline for streaming MariaDB data changes to Elasticsearch

Introducing mistry - an open source, general-purpose build server.

We were at Experience Fighters 2019 in Madrid here are our notes.

How we eliminated content repaints caused by animations

How we optimized our shop scanning performance without redesigning.

Laying the foundations for robust consumers & producers.

We were at Smashing conference 2017 in Barcelona, here are our notes.

We were at Frontend United conference 2017 in Athens, here are our notes.

A tale of web beacons, Rails and Go

Our journey from Rails asset pipeline and RequireJS to Webpack

Getting upgrade-ready for Puppet 4.x

We were at Smashing conference 2016 in Barcelona, here are our notes.

EuRuKo 2016 - Sofia

Big Data at Skroutz

Integrating fuzzy suggestions in a manner that makes sense

Interesting things behind the Skroutz 2016 major Redesign

Continuous Integration at Skroutz

What we learned as a Skroutz Front-end team during 2015

How to use prototyping to evaluate your assumptions.

What does Skroutz run on?

A summary of how we organise, structure and reuse style sheets at Skroutz.

A tool for verifying xml feeds from eshops

How we use the ELK stack to visualise and analyse visitor behaviour in real-time

A summary of 2013 Digitized conference in Athens

CSSDAY conference in Amsterdam, a conference about CSS technologies and techniques.

Euroku Ruby conference 2013 that took place in Athens

Baruco 2013 Barchelona Ruby Conference

Removing wildcard routes on ruby on rails

How Skroutz manage teams & development

design decissions on Skroutz redesign

Kowalski Progress report

An overview on Skroutz basic architecture

Newslettters on a Ruby on Rails app

Enable the usual social authentication methods

Installing

Spell checker libraries based on dictionaries (like aspell) have two major drawbacks:

We use our own fork of Resque, Resque-Mongo which uses Mongo instead of Redis and it works extremely well.

We have a couple of MySQL slave servers running debian here at Skroutz and I was searching for a way to monitor the service’s status. I run munin agents on all servers so I wrote a small python script to graph the slave’s status.

Before BlackholeStore

Normally, when you setup Nginx and Passenger to serve your rails application, all static files are served by Nginx without hitting Passenger. What really happens is that all static files that do exist are served by Nginx and the rest are passed on to passenger.

We’ve been using a home-made extension of acts_as_tree on our production site for quite some time. We finally found some time to release it as a plugin. You can find it on github. It’s not anything special, but it may give you some ideas for doing similar things.