Reflections on building and maintaining a React Component Library

During my first six months at commercetools, I worked in a product team. I worked with five other developers to deploy user facing features. Then I changed teams. Now I work on UI Kit: our React component library that implements our design system. The biggest change was “who” I was…

Writing Your First Code Generator

While in most industries, there is fear of automation and the impact it might have on the job markets, software engineering is the total opposite. The whole purpose of software engineering is to automate tasks that can be done by the machine, then come the question, isn’t writing code just…

How to reduce the distance when the UX designer works remotely

As my colleague Ida explained, the product team has embraced vertical, cross-functional teams. Each vertical team has its own UX/UI designer that focuses on the team’s area of responsibility. I am one of them. However, we are not sitting in the same office as the rest of our vertical team…

Serverless commercetools Integration

Serverless Commercetools Plugin commercetools's plugin for the Serverless Framework allows you to seamlessly integrate your serverless functions with…www.serverless.com commercetools API Extensions and Subscriptions allow you to customize and extend e-commerce functionality based on your company’s unique business needs. The Serverless Framework allows for fast and painless development of serverless cloud applications by introducing easy to use testing, CI/CD, scaling, and…

Building up a Data Science Team from Scratch

There are plenty of reasons for companies to incorporate data science and machine learning into their business. It can allow you to better understand and predict customer behavior, automate repetitive manual tasks, detect errors and anomalies faster, evaluate business decisions with data instead of mere intuition, get an edge over…

How we Roadmap in 2021

Why roadmap anyways (and how to do it well) I’ll admit it —…

Bring your APIs from good to awesome with UX research!

When you hear about “UX research”, “user experience” or “user interface design”, the first things which might come to mind are “websites”, “user tools”, “software interfaces”, “intuitive interactions” and maybe “beautiful graphics”. All good and true, but you might have forgotten some of our most favourite “users” — developers! In…

Integrating Siri in Existing E-Commerce Apps

Opportunity for Brands with Existing Apps In 2018, Apple announced that there were 500 million devices in the world that used Siri voice assistant. That has a huge…

Why you should build a React Component Library, and style it with CSS in JS

Mise en place is a concept from French cooking. It translates to “everything in its place”. It refers to the preparation before starting cooking. To make soup, you would start by chopping onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. Then with everything portioned and prepared, you start cooking. Mise en place is…

Migrating commerce Apple Watch App to GraphQL

In today’s constantly-connected era, we see many commerce avenues available across all existing platforms: from traditional websites and mobile apps that we’re used to, to voice assistants, IoT buttons, and last but not least — wearables. Even though not all platforms bring equal traffic and revenue, for many players it…

Solving Organizational Issues like a Product Manager

At commercetools, we strive to have a working environment where everyone and every team feels, and is, valued/respected. To strive towards something also means that we’re never quite satisfied with the status quo, and constantly look for…

Five practical tips when using React hooks in production

Since React hooks were introduced in early 2019 with React 16.8.0, we at commercetools were early adopters and have since been continuously refactoring our code base to make use of them. React hooks allow the use of state and other React features without writing a JavaScript class. By using them…

How we created an effective, game-based team feedback framework

Image designed by Freepik TL;DR: How we improvised and created our own full-fledged team feedback framework and made it fun with a game for progress evaluation. This framework is an internal tool to improve the team collaboration and does not relate to our approach at performance evaluation. Every team is a complex of people…

From Slack to Production

Our Full Component-Based Development Life Cycle We maintain UI-Kit, our open-source component library outside of our product repositories. It has its own Github repository, it’s own CI setup, and it’s own testing suite. Today I want to go through the steps we follow to get a feature from code to production in UI-Kit. The steps are…

Adopting Changesets for release and changelog automation

When working on Open Source Software (OSS), documentation is a crucial part of the project. It helps to ease adoption by providing in-depth descriptions on how to get started, how to use advanced functionalities, to communicate best practices with examples, and so on. However, documentation does not end with an…

GraphQL adoption at commercetools

GraphQL adoption by our customers Over the last few months we have noticed that more and more customers are using…

Easy steps to get OBS running for high-quality demo and presentation recordings

Earlier this year, the product team started conducting internal product update demos. Every other month, we would showcase the changes and new features from across the product team to the entire company. This would help keep everyone on top of the latest developments while giving them the opportunity to ask…

Testing JavaScript applications with confidence

It is undeniable that a lot has changed in the last few years in the world of JavaScript. This should not come as a surprise. We are particularly excited to see a lot of progress in the way we write and think about testing in the JavaScript ecosystem. If we…

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 in Barcelona

This year we’ve attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 Europe in Barcelona. It’s the largest Kubernetes conference, and this year more than 7000 people attended. The conference is so big, and the number of submitted talks about was so overwhelming, that another conference Cloud Native Rejekts was held on May 18–19…

Reverse Image Search with Machine Learning

Demo app from commercetools using the Image Search API. The Machine Learning team at commercetools is excited to release the beta version of our new Image Search API. Image search (sometimes called reverse image search) is a tool, where given an image as a query, a duplicate or similar image…

It’s done! Or is it?

commercetools has been growing a lot lately, and we want to continue doing that. Not only do we have new product owners, UX experts and developers joining, we are also growing areas around the core platform teams. More sales, more training, more support, more marketing; in offices all around the…

GraphQL and REST Level 3 (HATEOAS)

The short answer to this question is that HATEOAS isn’t a good fit for most modern use cases for APIs. That is why after almost 20 years, HATEOAS still hasn’t gained wide adoption…

Virtual Reality and commercetools

commercetools in VR The commercetools development lab does not have a modern home overlooking a forest. This experience exists only in an immersive state through two lenses and a small covered headset. Yet the house and landscape look real and can be traversed, interacted with, and you can even purchase objects throughout the…

How we transformed the product search for the better

The new Merchant Center product search and filter visual interface The product search functionality available in our Merchant Center lets merchants (and to be more specific, catalog managers) find products in their product catalog. Originally, we had a single search implementation catering to both catalog managers and shop customers. Over time, we noticed that their characteristics differed: storefront search queries…

Augmented Reality: Commercetools in AR

The commercetools development lab does not have a giant robot poster. It only exists in a superimposed state through a camera lens and video feed. Yet the poster looks real and can be sized, rotated, and placed on tap throughout the environment. Just as our brains render our own reality…