New Posts

Zalando Android App – How we managed it in only eleven weeks

Zalando_Android

Android is the most widely used mobile operating system in the world. So we, at Zalando, wanted to offer our Android users, a Zalando app to provide them the best shopping experience.
I would like to give you a peek into the work of the Mobile App Team – taking care of bringing you Zalando’s mobile apps – and more importantly how we managed to successfully complete the Android App Project in only eleven weeks. Continue reading

Zalando Tech @ KIT career fair in Karlsruhe

Zalando shopIf you are a student or graduate and looking for a challenging job, you might want to visit our stand at the KIT career fair.
There will be four Zalandos who are ready for your questions and looking forward to getting to know you. On Thursday the KIT is especially for students and graduates with an IT background.

Where and when?
KIT-Campus, Messezelt, Stand MZ 49
Thursday, 16th of May, 9.30h – 16.30h
http://www.rsm.kit.edu/karrieremesse/

Hope to see you on Thursday!

Team Management Technology – Fun Retreats

Fun with LEGO on our team retreats

Here at Zalando Technology, we held twelve fun team retreats at cool locations in under four months. We played games that helped us get to know one another better. And we played with LEGO! What were our team retreats really like? And why are team retreats so important to an organization in general? Read on to find out!
And make sure to check out our funny YouTube-video about the LEGO robots we built!
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Monitoring PostgreSQL with PGObserver

tech_blog_1A large number of PostgreSQL databases has been serving Zalando since fall of 2010, successfully fulfilling our requirements with its good performance, technical flexibility, and high availability.

Today the Zalando platform is powered by more than 25 PostgreSQL clusters, which together serve about 5 TB of data and on the lowest layer securely store everything that keeps the platform going. That includes a wide range of entities, such as customers, orders, articles, and stock data. Continue reading

GWT – Developer’s thoughts – Part 1

GWT

GWT Introduction and Setup

As a Java Developer my work in the Logistics Team at Zalando consists of creating functional and reliable software to be used in our warehouses through a varied technology stack where the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) plays an important role. This post and the following ones will focus on GWT for enterprise software development. Continue reading

Green or Orange? – A/B tests at Zalando

A/B Test

Have you ever wondered why the orange button you always click on to put something in your shopping bag has suddenly turned green? Probably not – we haven’t tested the button colour yet but it could be a possible scenario for an A/B test. If you recognise changes on our website along these lines, you may be part of a test.

Why do we run A/B tests?

The goal of A/B tests is to measure the effects of changes based on the onsite management team’s ideas and theories. An example of an A/B test is to test whether the green button works better than the orange button that we currently have. But what does ‘works better’ mean in this case?
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Zalando Android App – OUT NOW !

Zalando_Android

After a challenging development phase over the past weeks, our Shop Channel App Team has published the Zalando Android App v1.0 on the Google Play Store. You can find it here or just download it to your Android phone. We are very proud of our first mobile application, which was developed in-house and we hope our customers will enjoy the experience on our company’s most recent shopping platform. In a follow-up blogpost, we will give you more insights on how we managed to get the app up and running in only eleven development weeks. So stay tuned to hear from us pretty soon.

Zalando_Android

Recap – Zalando hosted Java User Group Dortmund

Java User Group - Weaving Stored Procedures into Java at ZalandoOnly 3 days ago, on April 16, Zalando provided the public with a look of what’s under the hood at Zalando’s backend development. Hosted at Zalando Technology in the prominent football city of Dortmund, Jan Mußler traveled all the way from Berlin to explain Zalando’s database philosophy to the local Java gurus, the Java User Group Dortmund. The topic of his talk: Weaving Stored Procedures into Java at Zalando. Today’s blogpost is a recap of the event.

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Fast log file analytics with python and sqlite

code-sample

‘Carsten, do you have 5 minutes?’

Sometimes work friends need small analytics jobs doing. Every time I hear ‘do you have five minutes?’, multiple log files have to be cross referenced because sometimes they need a bit more context than that what is easily possible with the trusted shell-all-star-combo of find, grep, sort and cut.

As an added wish, they’d be very happy if the result could somehow be worked on via SQL because there are already a lot of written SQL statements, professional SQL analytics tools or plain SQL blueprints out there, which help to get to the core of critical information without reinventing the wheel. In other words : ‘If I could get this data out of these log files in my SQL database in the next half hour, that would be great.’
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Breaking Up is Hard to do… or is it?: From Java 6 to 7

Silly walk

With the advent of Java 7, it’s time to move on and say goodbye to Java 6. For an extensive codebase like ours with about 400 modules, that’s a real challenge. But, as Barney Stinson famously said, “Challenge Accepted!”

Because we’ve already had a few new projects compiling with Java 7 and using the new language features, we were very motivated to migrate all of our remaining projects.
Continue reading