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Caching Hudl’s news feed with ElastiCache for Redis

Every coach and athlete that logs into Hudl immediately lands on their news feed. Each feed is tailored to each user and consists of content from teams they are in as well as accounts they choose to follow. This page is the first impression for our users and performance is critical. Our solution: ElastiCache for Redis.

Sep 16, 2016  |  by Joel Hensley  |  

Development

Benefits of Exposing Data Through GraphQL

GraphQL is rapidly growing in popularity within our orga­ni­za­tion at Hudl. Although we have only been using GraphQL for a few months, we are already reaping the benefits of it.

Aug 19, 2016  |  by Eric Groves  |  

Development

Measuring Availability: Instead of Nines, Let’s Count Minutes

It’s hard to find detailed expla­na­tions about how companies go about computing and tracking their avail­abil­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly for complex SaaS websites. Here’s how we do it for our primary web application, hudl​.com.

Jan 24, 2016  |  by Rob Hruska  |  

Development,  Quality Assurance,  Operations

The Low-Hanging Fruit of Redshift Performance

This post is a case-study about how we fixed some Redshift performance issues we started running in to as we had more and more people using it. A lot of the information I present is documented in Redshift’s best practices, but some of it isn’t easily findable or wasn’t obvious to us when we were just getting started. I hope that reading this post will save you some time if you are just getting started with Redshift and want to avoid some of the pitfalls that we ran into!

Nov 22, 2015  |  by Josh Cox  |  

Development,  Data Science,  Data Engineering,  Redshift,  Data Warehouse

Populating Fulla with SQL Data and Application Logs

This is the second in a series of posts on Fulla, Hudl’s data warehouse. This post discusses our methods to update Fulla daily with data from our production SQL databases and our application logs.

Nov 9, 2015  |  by Alex DeBrie  |  

Development,  Data Science,  Data Engineering,  Data Warehouse

Migrating Millions of Users in Broad Daylight

In August we migrated our core user data (around 5.5MM user records) from SQL Server to MongoDB. We moved the data during the daytime while still taking full production traffic, maintaining nearly 100% avail­abil­i­ty for reads and writes during the course of the migration. Our CPO fittingly described it as akin to ​“swapping out a couple of the plane’s engines while it’s flying at 10,000 feet.” I’d like to share our approach to the migration and some of the code we used to do it.

Oct 23, 2015  |  by Rob Hruska  |  

Development,  Operations

Hello Fulla

Over the last year, the Data Engineering squad has been building a data warehouse called Fulla. Recently, the squad rethought our entire data warehouse stack. We’ve now released Fulla v2 and Hudlies are querying data like never before giving us a better under­stand­ing of our customers and our product.

Sep 29, 2015  |  by Ben Cook  |  

Development,  Data Science,  Data Engineering,  Redshift,  Data Warehouse

Faster and Cheaper: How Hudl Saved 50% and Doubled Performance

We took time to optimize our EC2 instance types. By finding the maximum load a server could handle we were able to run a quarter as many app servers. Our hourly spend dropped by 50%. Despite the huge cost savings, we also saw a 2x improvement in response times! This came about by moving to a newer instance family.

Aug 14, 2015  |  by Jon Dokulil  |  

Development,  Operations

Using Deep Learning to Find Basketball Highlights

Hudl stores petabytes of video. In that video there are a lot of awesome plays. Figuring out which plays are the most interesting and sifting through the unin­ter­est­ing footage is a huge challenge. To solve this problem, we leveraged deep learning, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and crowd noise. The result: basketball highlights!

Jun 5, 2015  |  by William Spearman  |  

Development,  Data Science

How Our Product Team Works

One part of Hudl I frequently have to explain to people outside the company is the structure of our product team. Fellow developers at other companies, friends I graduated with, and plenty of people in between want to know how Hudl works — and as it turns out, there’s a lot to talk about. We’re constantly evolving and learning more about how to keep our heads on straight, and as we do, we want to get the lessons learned on the table.

Apr 14, 2015  |  by Jordan Degner  |  

Design,  Development,  Quality Assurance,  Project Management,  Operations
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