We found 7 forgotten cron jobs had been running for five years – here's how we fixed them and what we learned in the process. We recently started a small project to clean up how parts of our systems communicate behind the scenes at Buffer. Some quick context: we use something called SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service. These queues act like waiting rooms for tasks. One part of our system drops off a

In this article, Daniel, a Senior Product Designer, breaks down the development and release of Buffer's new mobile design system, Popcorn to Go. Delivering consistent mobile experiences is hard . Between iOS and Android's distinct design languages, different versions of native components, and Buffer's own design language, mobile apps can sometimes feel fragmented. Designers and developers end up s

Here’s why and how we replaced SMS authentication with email and authenticator apps. At Buffer, security has always been a balance: keeping our customers’ accounts safe while making login as seamless as possible for our global user base. A few months ago, we made a decision that might sound surprising — we removed SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) and moved fully to email-based verificatio

As part of our commitment to transparency and building in public, Buffer engineer Joe Birch shares how we’re doing this for our own GraphQL API via the use of GitHub Actions. ⚡ At Buffer, we’re committed to full transparency — which means building in public and sharing how our engineers work. You’ll find more content like this on our Overflow Blog here . We’ve all experienced it at some point — a

Learn more about the new feature at Buffer, called Ideas. With Ideas, you can store all your best ideas, tweak them until they’re ready and more. We recently launched a new feature at Buffer, called Ideas . With Ideas, you can store all your best ideas, tweak them until they’re ready, and drop them straight into your Buffer queue. Now that Ideas has launched in our web and mobile apps, we have som

With the surprising swap of Elasticsearch with Opensearch on AWS. Learn how the team at Buffer achieved secure access without AWS credentials. At Buffer, we’ve been working on a better admin dashboard for our customer advocacy team. This admin dashboard included a much more powerful search functionality. Nearing the end of the project’s timeline, we’ve been prompted with the replacement of managed

Learn the trick to fast fonts. This post shares how to load fonts fast. At Buffer, we’re constantly experimenting with ways we can improve our products and try out new ideas. We recently launched Start Page , a beautiful, flexible, mobile-friendly landing page that you can build in minutes and update in seconds. As a Software Engineer on Buffer’s team I’ve tackled a long list of fun projects, incl

How we converted our Button styling to a Material Button component. This post is an overview on migrating our component library. Header Photo by Pearse O’Halloran on Unsplash For our Android clients we have a small component library which is used to shared common visual elements across the different Android applications that we work on. We recently updated our applications to the Material Componen

Modularizing projects can bring different advantages to your team. This post is an overview on running modularized unit test on CI server. Header Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash Modularizing your Android projects can bring a number of different advantages to your team. Some of these include reduced build times, a greater separation of concerns and the ability to reuse components throughout our ap

A quick guide to tainting and labeling kubernetes. This post is an overview of tainting and labeling kubernetes nodes to run special workload. All right folks, I intend to keep this one short and that’s what I will do. I mean, it’s supposed to be easy but the official documentation( 1 , 2 ) makes it unnecessarily confusing. So I think maybe I can help to fill in the gap. I will be using one of our

Learn how to set kubernetes resource requests and limits. This post explains how to set Kubernetes resource requests and limits. A mystery So, it all started on September 1st, right after our cluster upgrade from 1.11 to 1.12. Almost on the next day, we began to see alerts on kubelet reported by Datadog. On some days we would get a few (3 – 5) of them, other days we would get more than 10 in a sin

So, why start a podcast? This post announces the Buffer Overflow podcast. Today we’re happy to announce our new engineering podcast, The Buffer Overflow Podcast. And, our first episode is now available for streaming! How to Listen The Buffer Overflow Podcast is now available on all major platforms today, so if you open your podcast player of choice and search for us, we should be there! Here are s

Learn about the things we did to prepare our app for the Android 10 release. This post explains getting Buffer publish ready for Android 10. Android 10 is officially here! On 3rd September it began rolling out for pixel devices, so we wanted to be sure that our app was ready to serve our users who would have Android 10 installed on their device. When these OS updates come around, as developers we

Learn about the library module navigation in Android apps. This post is an overview of the library module navigation in Android applications. Header Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash When it comes to building android applications, there’s no doubt that we’ll need to include some form of navigation to move between the different parts of our app. With modularisation becoming more and more popul

In this Snackchat, Joe Birch gives us a quick introduction to Go. This post shares a video on getting started with Go. At Buffer we regularly hold what we call ‘Snackchats’. These are short & informal presentations of something that we want to share with our team which help to build on our engineering culture and help each other to grow as engineers. Anyone on the team has the opportunity to give