Richie Ganney’s Post

How do you build redonculously highly available marketplaces that don't crash during peak periods? By using Kubernetes, of course 🚀 Our applications are hosted in Kubernetes, the leading tool for container orchestration. It allows us to easily host and scale our applications. One major benefit is the ability to scale during peak periods. After launching some of our marketplaces, we’ve received huge initial traffic spikes 📈 Trusty Kubernetes auto-scales with demand, ensuring our applications remain highly available. What other methods of scaling do people use?

A little post for the techies out there - insight into Continue's tech stack. All of our applications are built using TypeScript, full stack, meaning our front-end and back-end code is written in TypeScript. Have to give Harry Riley the cred on this one. When we started Continue, I was just getting back into coding after years in DevOps and Harry, a veteran TypeScripter, made the executive decision. Some major benefits of using TypeScript full stack: - Strong typing helps us catch bugs early, reduces errors and improves our code quality ✅ - Our entire codebase uses the same language which makes it consistent and maintainable 🔄 - TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, which means it’s works well with JavaScript frameworks, making our solutions mega efficient ⚙️ - Even with a small dev team we have a giant codebase. Using TypeScript full stack allows us to manage larger codebases as we grow 📈 Wonder who the better TypeScripter is now though Harry Riley 🤔

One of the major benefits of brands owning their own resale channel is the powerful data insights it can provide. A thriving resale channel is an entire market in and of itself, and understanding this market, which is deeply personal to the brand, is incredibly valuable. Brands can see rich, aggregate-level, behavioural data. The most searched items, most listed items, pricing trends, purchase patterns etc. The list goes on. While brands have this data on their primary market, capturing demand from the resale market amplifies their understanding of customer preferences. There is a whole market out there, already thriving on the likes of Vinted, Depop, Ebay etc. and ignoring it means missing out on valuable insights. Brands can: - See what styles are popular and make more of those items 📈 - Focus ads on items that people love 🎯 - Set competitive prices 💰 - Understand what sells well and help to manage stock better 📦 - Know what customers like for better marketing 🧠 It’s happening anyway, might as well take control and use it to your advantage 📊

One of the main challenges in building multiple marketplaces is the sheer volume of dev work required. We've got enough tasks to feed a small dev army. One thing that's helped massively is our CI/CD process. From the start, we built our deployment pipelines in GitLab, something my old friend Quin Glover, MBA introduced to me. While it's true you shouldn't build complex systems prematurely in a startup, we knocked this work out early doors, and automating our deployments has saved us hundreds of dev hours. Now, we deploy changes to production daily and can roll back in seconds if needed. I’m biased towards GitLab CI now but always keen to hear how others manage their deployments.

One really interesting trend we've noticed since launching our branded resale marketplaces is the high engagement in reselling when customers receive a little nudge. We’ve developed an "engagement engine" to guide and assist customers through the resale process. One key feature of this engine is to prompt customers to sell their items after a personalised period of time. With one click, customers can authenticate into their digital wardrobe, pre-populate details like price and condition, and list their item in seconds. Since introducing this feature, some of our marketplaces have experienced up to a 10% increase in the number of items listed. Many customers have also shared that they wouldn't have considered reselling their items without the reminder or if the process wasn’t as easy. Goes to show its the little things that can really amplify the resale process and keep clothes from landfill. What would you do to make it even easier?

After I had finished Makers, my first ever role was in DevOps Consulting - a blend of software development and IT operations. At first, I worried it wasn't "codey" enough and thought I wouldn't become a proper engineer. But I soon realised DevOps is actually the perfect balance between engineering and business. Without going into too much detail, DevOps at its core is about delivering value to the customer. In traditional software development, you might be isolated from the end product, ticking off Jira tasks without seeing their impact. DevOps changed that for me. It taught me to understand systems deeply and to focus on creating applications that truly benefit the customer. If you're considering a career in engineering, starting with DevOps is a fantastic choice. It gives you systems knowledge to really understand a product properly, and provides a foundation and a clear understanding of how your work impacts the customer and the business. It also pays a bit more generally speaking 😉

Looking forward to this one!

Sunny excursion to the studio of this handbag brand yesterday ☀️ All made to order and crocheted by hand 🧶 Excited to be building their resale channel. But more importantly, who wears it better?

This is definitely a step in the right direction, but how will it work from a cradle-to-cradle perspective? 🔄 Straight from the horses mouth William McDonough: “Everything is a resource for something else. In nature, the “waste” of one system becomes food for another. Everything can be designed to be disassembled and safely returned to the soil as biological nutrients, or re-utilised as high quality materials for new products as technical nutrients without contamination” This is a decent move, but will drinks containers qualify as technical nutrients? Have they been manufactured in a way that will allows them to reenter the production cycle easily? I have no idea, but thats surely what we should be aiming for?

Pumped for this! Get ready for the interview kween Lydia Hartley 👑