Curology’s March 2021 Hackathon

We are excited to announce that we have released an open source version of our internal tool, envloader, which is now available on packagist and can be installed via Composer! envloader is a PHP tool designed to simplify and standardize the way that application environments are configured. In this article, I’ll be explaining envloader and why we picked it.

I’m currently a senior at Miami University of Ohio graduating this spring with a degree in software engineering. For my final semester of college, I participated in the study away program as a software engineer intern on the Product Engineering team in San Francisco. Let me tell you about my experience.

Building a top-notch product requires teamwork and collaboration. For Curology’s distributed engineering team, we’ve carefully selected tools through trial and error to encourage a team-centric, collaborative culture. In this post, I’d like to share our current set of tools we use on our team. For each tool, I’ve also provided more context on other tools we’ve used and why we migrated away from them!

At Curology we use the Serverless Framework to build and deploy a myriad of AWS Lambda services that support everything from real-time data ingress to NLP topic labeling. Some of these services are written in Rust and recently we open sourced a piece of this infrastructure as a very small library called Vicuna.

For nearly two years Airflow has been an integral piece of Curology’s data stack. Along the way we have adopted patterns for Airflow development that have greatly accelerated our workflow. In this article, we would like to share some of the learnings from our journey developing with and operating Airflow at Curology.