NextRoll’s Hack Week 2023 was a week filled with ingenuity, collaboration, and groundbreaking ideas. From AI-powered solutions to production optimization, our teams went above and beyond to showcase their talents. Without further ado, let’s dive into the winning projects! AI/ML Award: The Future is ...

I know that I’m some years (decades?) late, but here’s my take on writing a monad tutorial. When you start learning about Functional Programming, sooner or later, you will hear about “monads” - the secret handshake for functional programmers. For those coming from imperative languages, there’s a con...

Background Amazon Web Services allows you to schedule tasks using ECS and CloudWatch, and for noncritical jobs, it is enough to run these regularly. It is simple, and we can manage many scheduled tasks with code using Terraform without the overhead and complexity of cloud orchestration systems such ...

We admit that this article is blatant Rust propaganda. If you are rust-curious, this is the place for you. We want to show you how the benefits of using Rust go beyond the language itself and trickle down to your whole ecosystem. Dynamic languages can undoubtedly be fun and convenient. However, alwa...

Introduction From AWS Graviton instances to M1 MacBooks, ARM processors are everywhere these days. This blog post illustrates the experiences, challenges, and solutions encountered in the Data Science Engineering team at NextRoll as we have come to embrace the ARM ecosystem. Docker / Containerizatio...

Introducing Rebar3 TypEr Do you have an Erlang codebase that’s a little short on type specs? Maybe you know TypEr exists, but wouldn’t it be nice to: incorporate it into your build system? configure it only once? have it ✨ magically✨ figure out all the command line arguments for you? Good news We bu...

Twice a year, NextRoll celebrates Hack Week, where employees get to work for a week on a project of their choice. It’s an excellent opportunity to experiment, learn new technologies and team up with people from across the company. You can learn all about Hack Week here. As NextRoll increasingly adop...

Over the past few years, we have spent several hackweeks writing, improving, and maintaining multiple open-source rebar3 plugins for the Erlang community, such as the formatter, Elvis, or Hank. Particularly for Hank, we even wrote an academic paper that, with the help of Laura M. Castro, I recently ...

Background MaskedLARK is the latest in a number of proposals for Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative. This initiative aims to increase user privacy in the browser by removing third-party cookies while still preserving the ad-tech ecosystem that has evolved on top of those cookies. A key part of the ...

In NextRoll, many teams are continuously working on different micro-frontend applications, many little bricks of our dashboards and products. To help these teams building homogeneous [and awesome] interfaces, we maintain a library of UI components. You can read about it in this blog post. On the wav...

Introduction Anytime you have an auction, you have the potential for the winner’s curse, a simple, yet surprising, statistical phenomenon. Despite its simplicity, the effect can have significant financial implications for anyone participating in auctions. We care about the winner’s curse at NextRoll...

Having a fast and reliable way to update your deployment environments is a game changer in terms of team velocity and confidence. ecs-ship is a simple yet powerful tool that can help your team ship faster. 10 minute read Introduction Most of our teams at NextRoll leverage the power of AWS ECS for co...

From the creators of rebar3_format, here comes… rebar3_hank, a powerful but simple tool to detect dead code around your Erlang codebase (and kill it with fire!). Developers can use this rebar plugin in addition to a linter (Elvis), Xref, and Dialyzer; they complement each other perfectly. 10 minute ...

Updating the underlying systems that our service depends on (be them operating system, VMs, core libraries, databases, or other components) is a regular part of our systems’ lifecycle. In this post, we’ll discuss how we found a performance regression when updating to a newer erlang OTP release, the ...

Our Rollers (employees) are the most essential “ingredient” to our success and culture. This pandemic is like nothing any of us have been through before. So, as we navigate this time with our Rollers, we want to ensure they are being supported… but we can’t read their minds! The best way to understa...

Reducing costs on infrastructure can often feel like a chore when done in isolation. In this post, we’ll discuss the coordinated process that NextRoll is using to make the effort feel like a full-team project with the satisfaction of having a job well done. Costs have a nasty habit of accumulating o...

OMFG (one-minute file generator) is a service that reads log lines from many Kinesis streams and saves them to S3, creating one compressed file every minute. Its first version was written long ago using Apache Storm, but it became expensive and sometimes unstable over time. Our target was to reduce ...

It’s been 2 years working remotely as a Software Engineer at NextRoll, a tech company in Silicon Valley. When I started the journey to find a new job, I’ve never aimed to be working in the U.S. center of innovative technology companies. I didn’t think I could be the first Latina working remotely in ...

NextRoll’s real-time bidding (RTB) platform has been featured several times in this tech blog: we run a fleet of Erlang applications (the bidders) that typically ranges between one and two thousand nodes. As described in past articles, an ongoing goal of the RTB team —as well as a source of interest...

Women in Tech - Spotlight: Larissa Licha 6 minute read March is Women’s History Month and in honor of this occasion, NextRoll is launching a month-long Women in Tech Spotlight – where we highlight a few of the women here at NextRoll. This will be a limited three-part series of interviews, showcasing...

Women in Tech - Spotlight: Elena Rose 6 minute read March is Women’s History Month and in honor of this occasion, NextRoll is launching a month-long Women in Tech Spotlight – where we highlight a few of the women here at NextRoll. This will be a limited three-part series of interviews, showcasing th...

Introduction As COVID-19 continues to spread and cause anxiety, many tech companies have begun encouraging or mandating that employees work from home. For the time being, NextRoll is among these companies. Fortunately, NextRoll engineering has long had a remote-friendly work culture; I myself have b...

Women in Tech - Spotlight: Iva Ivanova 5 minute read March is Women’s History Month and in honor of this occasion, NextRoll is launching a month-long Women in Tech Spotlight – where we highlight a few of the women here at NextRoll. This will be a limited three-part series of interviews, showcasing t...

In recent years, many language ecosystems have developed automatic code formatters to reduce the mental overhead of code readers and therefore to share code more easily. These tools work by ensuring that all code written in the same language looks the same. Some examples of these tools include gofmt...

NextRoll Hack Week 5 minute read Hello! Alex here from NextRoll! Don’t you ever wish there was a time reserved to build any idea you had in mind? Maybe it’s some technical debt that you’re hoping to clean up, some new language you’re hoping to play with, or just collaborating with other engineers in...

Describing how NextRoll is handling processing petabytes of data using AWS Batch. 15 minute read In this blogpost, we are going to review how NextRoll is using AWS Batch for processing data, and how we benefit from this platform. We will start with an overview of the company and explain our needs fo...

Being a part of the team at NextRoll detailed through the eyes of an intern on the analytics team. 7 minute read ‘Cali or Bust’. Anyone in the math faculty’s co-op program at the University of Waterloo can tell you what that means – wanting to land a sweet internship in California or nothing at all....

We open-sourced a Python library for HLLs compatible with postgresql-hll. 5 minute read What is python-hll? We recently open-sourced python-hll, which is an implementation of HyperLogLog whose goal is to be storage compatible with java-hll, js-hll, and postgresql-hll. At NextRoll, we use these libra...

5-7 minute read “Onboarding customers is taking too long!” “Our customers are feeling frustrated!” “Our sellers are missing their quotas!” “Q4, our busiest season of the year, is right around the corner, and we need a solution ASAP!” All of the above complaints were funneled into the Solutions Engin...

We moved from HLLs stored in HBase to HLLs stored in Postgres with great results. 5-10 minute read What is HyperLogLog (HLL)? HyperLogLog (HLL) is a useful and interesting probabilistic data structure used to count unique values in a given data set with good accuracy and speed. Normally, to count un...