BV blog

(cover image generated with Midjourney) 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. […]

(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 […]

My thoughts and take homes after using Kedro for 6 months in various projects and teams.

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. It 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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

(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 “proofs of concept” projects to be iterated on if they succeed. This team’s project is to generate reports based on aggregations […]

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 […]

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 […]