A great engineer once told me that it doesn’t matter how big your organisation is, you’ll always experience growing pains. Canva is far from immune to these pains, and we’re constantly reevaluating our infrastructure to ensure that systems designed for Canva of old are still up to scratch for Canva of the present, and will be in good stead to support the Canva of the future. Read more...

On May 6th, 2015, Canva hosted the first of a series of quarterly tech talks. Our goal is to bring together like-minded software craftspeople to share knowledge and experiences. The Sydney tech community already has an excellent range of recurring events (such as SydJS, Women Who Code, and Web Directions), but we’ve decided to maintain focus on topics particularly relevant to starups with this new event series. We aim to showcase speakers from both inside and outside Canva. Our first night of talks was on the topic of scalable startup technology. Read more...

As the Canva engineering team continues to grow, we’ve started to codify some of the “tribal knowledge” that previously went unspoken. This post is our attempt to describe the practices we’ve found help us work more efficiently as a team. It’s been really useful so far as a survival guide for new engineers, so we thought we’d share it. This isn’t meant to be a prescription for every team; it’s just what works for us. Read more...

Canva’s design editor features an auto-save function. While you’re working on a design we periodically send differences to our server. This means you don’t lose too much work if your computer crashes or you accidentally close your browser tab. During periods of heavy use, we needed a mechanism to ask the browser and iOS applications to back off and reduce the frequency of auto-saves. Read more...

As an engineering team grows (along with functionality and number of users), the need for consistency in some areas increases dramatically. You quickly notice problems if the technology with which the software is developed differs from the technology on which it is deployed, and if developers have local environments that differ because their machines are self-managed. It also makes for an increasingly challenging exercise for new starters to become effective quickly. We’ve decided to build a Standard Development Environment (SDE) to address these issues. Read more...