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. …

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. …

How we use machine learning to estimate depth and salience maps for photos in Canva — By Kerry Halupka The Canva Photo Editor Group’s mission is to make our user’s photos look amazing. …

Applying classic principles from physics and optics to build the best possible camera effects at Canva — By Bhautik Joshi We love the look of high-end portraits — that shallow-depth-of-field look where the subject is in-focus but the background is blurred out. But some cameras, especially those on smartphones, don’t quite manage to do this convincingly. …

How we deal with potential problems when running Canva’s recommendation system — By Mayur Panchal and Thien Bui At Canva, we’re always working to improve the user experience of our product. We constantly seek to empower everyone to design regardless of their design experience. …

The technology that powers Continuous Localization at Canva — By Minh Cung and Simon Hammond At Canva, part of our commitment to inclusivity is building a global design product that’s accessible to everyone in the world. Our vision is to empower the world to design, so one of our crazy big goals is to be available in every language…

How the hyperparameters of our machine learning models are tuned at Canva — by Ryan Lin, Yiran Jing, and Paul Tune Canva uses a variety of machine learning (ML) models, such as recommender systems, information retrieval, attribution models, and natural language processing for various applications. A typical problem is the amount of time and engineering effort in choosing a set of optimal hyperparameters…