It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble — well, sometimes it is — By Jonathon Belotti Canva is an online graphic design platform, providing design tools and access to a vast library of ingredients for its users to create content. Leveraging GPU-accelerated machine learning (ML) within our graphic design platform has allowed us to offer simple but powerful product features to users. …

Scaling pre-development, rollout, and post-production SEO testing at Canva — by Siddharth Salunke Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps a website rank better in search results on search engines. SEO can also be considered as a set of best practices to ensure your web pages are positioned or ranked higher in organic search results. Search is the best possible way for…

Using a monorepo causes a lot of performance challenges for git. Here’s how we solve them at Canva — By Anh Le At Canva, we made the conscious decision to adopt the monorepo pattern with its benefits and drawbacks. Since the first commit in 2012, the repository has rapidly grown alongside the product in both size and traffic. Over the last 10 years, the code base has grown from…

How the data analytics platform team scaled data ingestion from various services at Canva — By Justin Ty and Jaskirat Grover Introduction The data analytics platform at Canva empowers the business to make data-driven insights and decisions. The platform ingests and processes data from multiple sources, including a growing number of internal first-party services. We use these insights to provide a better experience for our users.

Using CSS grid to render complex webpages responsively — By Benjamin Morris Responsiveness is hard As software engineers, we have a plethora of tools available to control the rendering of a webpage (Introduction to CSS layout) and can easily create bespoke user interfaces for different devices (Using media queries). An experienced web developer can manually convert a single design into a set…

How we position Infrastructure Engineering as a value-add — By Ryan Armstrong The Infrastructure (Infra) group at Canva is growing fast. The group is composed of around 200 engineers who are responsible for the delivery of engineering workstations, software development tools, production workload scheduling, scalable and durable data-stores, and most importantly, the primitive components that product engineering teams can…

Lessons learned from migrating 1000+ browser-functional tests from Chimp, WebdriverIO, and Saucelabs to CodeceptJS and Playwright — By Benjamin Sejas and Srini Ramasamy At Canva, we empower the world to design by providing a powerful and intuitive user interface that anyone can use. However, with 75 million people using Canva each month and more than 350 frontend engineers making 160+ changes per day, we must keep our…

Our migration journey and key lessons from this journey — by James Gover After realizing that it took a literal team of engineers to keep our self managed Solr infrastructure up to date and working, we are moving to a managed search solution — Elasticsearch! Over 2021, we have migrated one of our smaller search indexes fully to Elasticsearch and…

The journey of the eyedropper in Canva — by Xidorn Quan Using an eyedropper to pick a color from the screen is ubiquitous for design software, yet Canva has lacked such a functionality on the web app until very recently. …