Procore Engineering Blog

Black Box SLIs

Adopting an SLO culture involves identifying the metrics that matter without drowning in noise and alert fatigue. The black box concept lets us aggregate granular metrics into SLIs that focus on the user experience as an indicator of system reliability.

Observability

Standardizing Observability at Procore

Implementing observability into all of your services can be a large undertaking. At Procore, we developed observability libraries to lower the barrier of implementing standardized observability across services, while also reducing dependency on specific vendors.

DRYing out Procore’s Kubernetes Configuration

In order to meet the increased demand to run more microservices, the Procore Cloud Platform Orchestration team has been tasked with provisioning and maintaining a growing number of Kubernetes clusters.

Test

A Self-Service Model for Load Testing of Web Services at Scale

An entire system's performance comprises the performance of the individual components (services). It is imperative that each service is tested individually. A common Load Test Model that defines tests as data enables development teams to implement and own their load tests on a self-service basis.

BIM

Designing for BIM in the Field

BIM is essentially the 3D prototype of the project. It can be extremely valuable for understanding how a project is to be built. Until now, the construction industry has been ruled by B2B software, where the user experience was an afterthought.

Observability

The Observability Mindset - Why It Matters

Observability is all about service reliability so that we can provide the utmost customer experience. Ultimately, all roads lead back to the customer and their experience with the product.

Observability

Observability - The Basics

Microservice environments require significant coordination, insight, and care to be able to monitor and measure requests passing through the system. As Procore continues to scale its microservice architecture, its Engineering teams are expanding their observability capabilities.

Frontend

Dynamic Frontend Testing With Mirage JS

Procore's testing methods must scale proportionate to our growth. We sought a better tool for ensuring we only release quality code into production. We found and implemented Mirage JS and we want to walk our audience through our process.

Observability

Better Monitoring and Observability at Procore

Procore is on a journey to improve our architecture, to better deliver our vision to customers, and to improve our internal developer experience. A key pillar to supporting this journey is improving our Observability.

deployment

Sequenced Deployments for Incompatible Front-end and Back-end code releases

Deployment of new code is not instantaneous and can bring unexpected challenges, even in seemingly simple cases.

Process

When will it be done?

When will it be done? A simple question, but one that can seem impossible to answer. In 2019, my team and I attended a two-day workshop on Advanced Agile Metrics by agile expert and veteran Dan Vacanti to understand how to answer this question.

architecture

Streamlining Architecture Decisions at Procore

At Procore, we strive to have decisions made at the appropriate level, rather than being a strictly top down organization. We also need to ensure good decisions are made, which means they are based on solid engineering principles, take cross-functional considerations into account, and we remain consistent across teams. We

Data

DAD eliminates top DB CPU consumer with a single environment variable

The Database Admin (DAD) team is responsible for DB performance, and let’s just say Procore’s growth is keeping us pretty busy. We recently noticed that SET application_name = ? has been climbing the ranks of RDS Performance Insights (PI) until it became the #1 consumer of CPU on our

Android

Fix your Android Memory Leaks in Fragments

In the world of mobile, there are many resource constraints, memory being one of the most precious. Early last year, the Procore Android team noticed various crashes in the mobile application caused by insufficient memory. The number of crashes was also spread over various devices, and the issue manifested itself

Skills

Nomad Your Way to Fresh Tech Skills

One of the lesser-known perks of being an engineer at Procore is that our Engineering department offers employees the opportunity to "nomad" with other teams for a short period of time (typically two to four weeks). When you nomad, you immerse yourself entirely with the new team, attending their agile

Productivity

Make High Impact Decisions with Confidence using Alignment Records

Imagine you need to set the future technical direction of a large Engineering organization. How do you capture the input from all of your Architect Engineers and Engineering Directors and quickly transform it into a visual format that would increase confidence in technical decisions? At Procore, we evolved the Fist

Engineering

Fix What Bugs You

Have you ever found yourself willfully ignoring something you know you could do better, just because it seemed too unimportant to be worth improving? I have, and it really bugged me. I finally bit the bullet and improved it, and quickly realized how important a small change can be. Software

How to Make a Query 280,000 Times Faster

We usually make small iterative improvements in performance. However, on rare occasions, an opportunity arises to make an improvement of five orders of magnitude by changing a single line! After learning about a slow query that was hitting our statement timeout from one of our Site Reliability Engineers, I reformatted

Growth

Shape Your Own Role at Procore

Here at Procore, we don't just embrace change; we drive change! Procore Engineers can shape their own roles and choose to what degree their work affects the company. You drive your own Procore experience. Today, I’m going to share some stories of Procore Engineers who have successfully individualized their

Procore

Being an Engineering Intern at Procore

About two years ago, when I was first searching for a software engineering internship, I remember asking myself, “What do I want to get out of this new experience? What would an ideal internship be?” It really boiled down to three main asks: I wanted to be treated and challenged

Procore

Breaking out of silos

Authors: Stephanie Pirman and Kellie Spears What we’ve learned by building products on multiple platforms in the same squad A squad is comprised of multiple roles at Procore including software engineers, quality assurance engineers, UX engineers and product managers. We (Stephanie and Kellie) work on the Field Productivity Squad

Procore

When Milliseconds Matter

Authors: Shayon Javadizadeh, Ishjot Walia Background Quota Minder is a microservice written in Elixir that enforces API Rate Limits on our third party integrators and internal applications. It is built with knowledge of the Procore domain which enables us to construct rate limits that make sense for Procore specifically, as

RailsConf

Procore speakers share highlights from RailsConf 2019

A few weeks ago, Procore sponsored and attended RailsConf 2019, one of the world’s largest gatherings of Rails developers and Ruby enthusiasts. Procore’s application is built on Ruby on Rails, which is why being a part of RailsConf is valuable from both a business and employee perspective. This

Technical Debt

Taming the Beast

Pragmatic, Proactive Debt Management at Procore R&D Tim Doherty is Staff Software Engineer at Procore Technologies, where he’s tirelessly championing TDD and sustainable development. He also runs the Santa Barbara JavaScript Meetup and speaks at technical conferences. Background I’ve been building and shipping software professionally, in

Navigating the Tech World

I recently had the opportunity to be a part of a panel with six other inspiring women at the Women in Computer Science “Navigating the Tech World” meet-up at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As an alumni of the school, this was a great opportunity to give back as