Published in Picnic Engineering·Dec 14, 2021M1 Pro MacBooks: Building a Tech FoundationOn June 22, 2020, CEO Tim Cook announced Apple’s two-year transition plan to their own silicon in his WWDC keynote speech. This marked the 3rd time in Apple’s history that the tech giant had transitioned to using a new CPU architecture. For tech giants and scale-ups alike, ambitious strategic tech…M 112 min readM 112 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·Apr 21, 2021Picnic Tech RadarsOpinionated tech radars have been on the rise as of late. The Lindy effect postulates that the future life expectancy of non-perishable things like a technology are proportional to their current age. That is, as we move forward in time, we acquire more technology than we replace. This applies to…Techradar4 min readTechradar4 min read
Oct 25, 2020The Prominent Tech Team Leadership Styles of Middle Earth.So as a hobby project of mine I’m 25k words into writing a novel. It is based on a future dystopian society on Venus. Who would have guessed it? Someone in tech writing about science fiction. I’m not an avid reader. In fact I find writing, and the little of…Leadership8 min readLeadership8 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·May 6, 2020Micrometer and the Modern Observability StackIn the Picnic backend landscape, our monitoring stack looks like this. New Relic is our APM provider for tracing and performance monitoring of our Java and Python backend services. We have also experimented with DataDog as an alternative provider. Prometheus is our internal metrics collection system for application metrics which…Java11 min readJava11 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·Apr 29, 2020Monitoring and Observability at PicnicWhat does a typical 24 hours look like at Picnic? Customer demand is predicted, tens of thousands of trading units are ordered from suppliers, and delivered Just In Time to our warehouses. Then hundreds of thousands of products are processed, shelved and picked into customer totes by Shoppers and shipped…Observability8 min readObservability8 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·Jan 14, 2020Cryptocurrency Incentivised Code Reviewing, Open Sourced.Some time ago Picnic published a blog post about our cryptocurrency powered code review leaderboard. The general goal is simple: achieve code review harmony via gamification of code reviewing and add cryptocurrency payment as a fun and novel reward system. In the article we stated that we would open source…Code Review4 min readCode Review4 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·Jan 10, 2019RxJava: 5 Steps to Reactive EnlightenmentDuring my time learning and using RxJava I’ve read numerous blog posts, watched countless hours of online talks and presentations, attended conferences and coffee chats and on a number of occasions I’ve attempted to boil down the most condensed approach for teaching its core concepts. I have ultimately resided to…Rxjava11 min readRxjava11 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·May 23, 2018Crypto incentives for code reviewsIntroduction There is little debate on the matter, the Blockchain buzzword has stolen a chunk of the tech limelight from AI and machine learning in the past 6 months. …Crypto8 min readCrypto8 min read
Published in Picnic Engineering·Mar 8, 2018Reactive Programming at Picnic: Our findings thus farHere at Picnic we are concerned with creating the smoothest and most satisfying online grocery shopping experience for our customers. From a backend perspective this means creating systems that are Resilient, Responsive and Reliable. New features should be easy to implement and satisfy these three R’s from the get-go. …Android8 min readAndroid8 min read
