Over the past few months, the Discogs development team and IT team have been working on a new solution for storing and serving certain images to Discogs. As we planned to develop the avatar and seller banner features, we decided these features would be a great test run for running a service in the cloud, […]

Enter the Monolith As long as Discogs has been around, it has lived its life as a monolith. Much of the underlying code that powers Discogs today has changed vastly since the early days and while we’ve made significant hardware improvements, we still have plenty of room to grow. With the advent of cloud computing, […]

Introduction When a site becomes sufficiently interesting to the rest of the world, there are two options: Force the community to use your native language (usually English). Or implement an internationalization system (commonly referred to as i18n). The first option isn’t practical for a serious business. Given that it’s much easier to implement an i18n […]

We recently updated the User Dashboard to load modules asynchronously via AJAX. Wait. What does that even mean? Back in the olden days of about two weeks ago the User Dashboard worked much differently. The server went through a list of the modules the user had selected to appear on the Dashboard and rendered the […]

MongoDB was initially added to our stack 2 years ago for our currently on-hold Tracks project. With some initial success, we quickly migrated over some of our other persistence layers; blog entries, forum threads, help documentation and other tools. After 2 years we’ve discovered that while MongoDB is very good at certain things, it is […]

Over the summer, our JavaScript code transitioned to using a module pattern. It’s now more organized, maintainable, and a little bit faster. Before, all of the js built upon a ds namespaced object. Each js file would then build upon this object. The artist page JavaScript would claim the ‘artist’ property, and so on. There’s […]

September 11th – 17th Features, Updates, & Chores Optimized some of our background processing tasks for resiliency Bug Fixes Fixed an issue where banned marketplace items could be listed via bulk upload Fixed loading non-existent seller page to correctly display 404 error October 2nd – 8th Features, Updates, & Chores New Beta feature for modal […]

We recently rolled out a new feature in your settings that you may have noticed. It’s called “Labs” and ostensibly allows you to opt-in or out of features ready for public-beta. While admittedly a simple implementation in its current form the scope and impact are broad and its origin is informed by human nature and […]

Discogs’ database search recently received a major upgrade, as we announced on the blog a while ago, and as of last week we’ve now fully switched from Solr to Elasticsearch. Objects in motion… Fundamentally, Elasticsearch and Solr aren’t all that different. Both are layers on top of the venerable Lucene project; both provide an HTTP […]

At Discogs, we like to participate in hack days where each person gets the opportunity to build anything they want that relates to Discogs. During the latest hack day, cburmeister and I worked on improving the order page. A recurring problem is that new buyers do not understand the order process, sometimes abandoning the order. […]