Engineering (3)

We’ll be leveraging AWS Polly’s natural speech capabilities to implement this feature and Stream's Messaging API for our chat infrastructure and interface. AWS Polly supports dozens of languages and a wide selection of natural-sounding male and female voices. When you send text to AWS Polly's API, it returns the audio to your application as a

💡 This blog post describes an outdated approach to using Javascript against our Chat platform. Javascript developers can now use SDKs specific to their tech stack, like our dedicated Angular Chat SDK. It allows you to build chat experiences with ease. You can still refer to the post below for its concepts and ideas, but

Creating an application is a lot of work! Deploying your application shouldn't be. Every developer has said at one time or another, "it works locally, but I can't get it to work on the server!"; it can take you hours, or even days, to figure out what went wrong and to put a fix in

Over the last few years, CSS-in-JS solutions have become prevalent across the front-end landscape with many offerings such as styled-components, and emotion that provides a way to colocate your components and style definitions. The power of these libraries lies in the ability to use JavaScript features to enhance reusability & easily create a design system

TL;DR Stream released vg almost three years ago, and since its inception, Go has improved quite a bit in regards to its dependency management. Since Go has come so far, we’re now advocating that the community use native Go modules rather than vg. The Gist Stream provides an API as a service to build highly

The Rundown In 2019 we realized we had a big problem here at Stream. Our documentation for Feeds and Chat was outdated, hard to navigate, and difficult to update due to legacy systems that were in place. We made it a goal to set out and build the best documentation site available to the developers

Here on the Stream Services team, we have the pleasure of working with a variety of clients and get to solve exciting challenges daily. This blog post provides a peek into one such occasion by highlighting the intricacies of building a native app in Javascript, and the creative solutions that inevitably must arise to support

GraphQL is a technology that helps developers across the board to build more robust software more quickly. The ability to request all of the information you need in a single request is a game-changer. It has simplified my backend development of APIs for consumption by mobile and web applications that would normally rely on RESTful

Are you trying to decide if you should use MongoDB or DocumentDB? With the recent controversy surrounding licensing with MongoDB, it can be confusing to decide which option is right for your company or project. Amazon decided the core MongoDB code is challenging to scale while remaining highly available. Amazon wrote their implementation, which is

If you’re setting out to build a highly usable developer tool, it goes without saying that a proper CLI to interface with your API is paramount. As Zeit and Heroku have been setting the tone for these types of developer tools by doing extensive research into best practices when it comes to a command line “experience”, we started our

Here at Stream, we use Go extensively, and it has drastically improved our productivity. We have also found that by using Go, the speed is outstanding and since we started using it, we have implemented mission-critical portions of our stack, such as our in-house storage engine powered by gRPC, Raft, and RocksDB. Today we are

This tutorial combines two of my favorite things, the Go programming language and images of SpaceX rocket launches. With Go rapidly picking up adoption in the developer community, its becoming one of the leading languages for building backend systems. Go’s performance is similar to Java and C++, yet it’s almost as easy to write as

Lately, I’ve been using Google’s feed on Android and it contains several interesting best practices for content discovery. Google’s feed strikes an effective balance between machine learning and follow relationships. With the recent advancements in AI, it can be hard to know when to apply AI and when to use a more manual method. This

Asynchronous functions are a good and bad thing in JavaScript. The good side is that asynchronous functions are non-blocking and, therefore, are fast – especially in a Node.js context. The downside is that dealing with asynchronous functions can be cumbersome, as you sometimes have to wait for one function to complete in order to get

First Things First Here at Stream, we power activity feeds for 300+ million end users and love playing around with ways to utilize our product in all sorts of use cases. Most recently, we built Winds, an open-source RSS and Podcast application with a strong focus on UI and UX. Shortly after we launched our

Earlier this year, Stream launched Winds 2.0, an open-source and native application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, which provides an entirely new way to consume RSS feeds and Podcasts. It was our first time building a native application, so we chose to go with Electron, a framework for creating cross-platform applications. In addition to Electron,

There's hardly a developer who doesn’t use GitHub. With all those stars, pulls, pushes and merges, GitHub has a plethora of data available describing the developer universe. As a Data Scientist at Stream, my job is to develop recommender systems for our clients so that they can provide a better user experience for their customers. With that said, I wanted to see if I could build a recommendation

Stream powers feeds for over 300+ million end users. With all of those users relying on our infrastructure, we’re very good about testing everything that gets pushed into production. Our primary codebase is written in Go, with some remaining bits of Python. Our recent showcase application, Winds 2.0, is built with Node.js and we quickly

Hi there! I’m Ken. I’m a Developer Advocate over at GetStream.io, where we build personalized and scalable activity feeds. For the last several months, I’ve been working on Winds 2.0, an open-source RSS reader and podcast listening app. It’s built in Node.js, Electron, Redux and React, and as of this writing, has over 5,000 stars

panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference If you ever used Go, you probably saw this error at least once. Somewhere a nil pointer or nil interface was passed to a function that doesn’t handle nil. In all cases this is a programming error, either the function should handle nil or the

Go is one of the fastest growing languages around. We ourselves use it extensively inside the Stream API service. Support for Go was added almost two years ago by MrHenry and HyperWorks, which open-sourced a Go client. We are proud to announce that starting today, we are releasing our official Go API client. You can

One of my favorite parts of my job as a Developer Evangelist at Stream is building sample applications. It is an enthralling way to engage and interact with potential and existing customers, as well as show off the fun technology we use and build with every single day. The applications I build range from small

This blog post is broken into two parts and harkens back to learnings from a prior post. The sum of all these parts is altogether my best effort to provide you with a framework of how to take the creation of personalized news feeds to the next level. Part 1: Theory behind a very basic

We're currently updating this article. Please check back soon. In the meantime, check out these helpful resources: APIs: Feeds, Messaging UI Kits: Feeds, Messaging Tutorials: Feeds, Messaging

Isn’t it great how Instagram’s “Explore” section displays content that matches your interests? When you open the application, the content and recommendations shown are almost always relevant to your specific likes, interests, connections, etc. While it may be fun to think we’re the center of the Instagram universe, the reality is that personalized, relevant content

Updated May 14th 2019 to better reflect improvements to Go in the last 2 years (package management, better performance, faster compile times and a more mature ecosystem) Switching to a new language is always a big step, especially when only one of your team members has prior experience with that language. Early this year, we

Many modern JavaScript frontend frameworks are complemented by a standalone Command Line Interface (CLI) program that assists with setting up a suitable development environment. Since many developers who work with Stream also use one or more of these frameworks, we like to stay up to date. We're also happy to pass on what we’ve learned.

Stream’s API is used in production by more than 500 companies and 200 million end users. While we like to move fast, we definitely don’t like to break things. An extensive test infrastructure enables us to move quickly and deploy code with confidence. A solid testing workflow is essential to stay productive as your team

Social media is a series of networks connecting individuals, companies, organizations, and groups to one another. These networks can transcend local, national, and international borders connecting people to networks far and wide. With all those connections, how can a user find the ones that they want to connect with? That’s where follow suggestions come in.

TypeScript is a language that Stream has been interested in for quite some time. Over the past year, we've had an increasing number conversations with TypeScript and Angular developers. So naturally, it's been our ambition to eventually distribute Type Definitions for our JavaScript API Client library. That time has come. The process of coding Type

Most companies who create a social media network do so with the end goal of collecting information, interests and habits of their users in order to monetize that data (usually through advertising). They guard this data heavily and many of the largest social networks are trusted enough to be Identity Providers for OAuth-based authentication and

In this blogpost I will describe how to implement a feature-rich activity feed that will make relevant and accurate personalization algorithms easier to implement. As we have already explored in previous blog posts, app personalization is linking activity feeds and user engagement data. In most cases, a well thought out feed structure provides valuable information

Introduction Software performance is critical to a SaaS company like Stream and while the majority of our infrastructure is written in Python, we are actively porting portions of our code base to Go. Stream is an API for building scalable feeds and now handles over 20 billion feed updates a month. While Python has been

As a Data Scientist that works on Feed Personalization, I find it it important to stay up to date with the current state of Machine Learning and its applications. Most of the time, using some of the better-known recommendation algorithms yields good initial results; however, sometimes a change in the model is essential to provide customers

In this short tutorial we will show you how to use Custom Ranking for your activity streams and news feeds. By default all feeds on Stream are ranked chronologically. Custom ranking allows you to take full control over how your feeds are sorted. Some common use cases include: Showing popular activities higher in the feed

Update for August 2017: This guide has been updated for Restify 5 and Mongo 3.4 with modern Javascript practices. Clone the Github repo to get the full working project. Choosing the Technology With the multitude of JavaScript frameworks and databases available nowadays, there are countless options for building APIs. For this guide, we're working with

Winds is an open source RSS reader is powered by React, Redux, Sails and Stream. This tutorial explains how we’ve built personalization for Winds, as an example of how using Stream makes it easy to build personalized feeds. About Personalization Personalization is a very broad concept. In this case, personalization equates to leveraging engagement data

In this post I discuss the Multi Armed Bandit problem and its applications to feed personalization. First, I will use a simple synthetic example to visualize arm selection in with bandit algorithms, I also evaluate the performance of some of the best known algorithms on a dataset for musical genre recommendations. What is a Multi-Armed Bandit? Imagine

Originally built by Facebook in 2009, Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database designed to handle large amounts of data across a large number of servers. Cassandra at Stream At Stream, we use Cassandra as the primary data store for our feeds. Cassandra stands out because it’s able to: Shard data automatically Handle

The problem of content discovery and recommendation is very common in many machine learning applications: social networks, news aggregators and search engines are constantly updating and tweaking their algorithms to give individual users a unique experience. Personalization engines suggest relevant content with the objective of maximizing a specific metric. For example: a news website might want to increase

This is a bonus post in the Cabin tutorial series created by getstream.io. Visit getstream.io/cabin for an overview of all the tutorials, as well as a live demo. The source code can be found on the Stream GitHub repository for Cabin, and all blog posts can be found at their respective links below: Introduction React

We are happy to announce stream-meteor. This integration library makes it easy to build scalable newsfeeds and activity streams for your Meteor app.

Version 3 of the JavaScript & Node library adds support for new Stream API features, reduces the size of the distributable JavaScript file, creates library documentation pages, and improves browser compatibility of our client.

Before switching from Redis, there are quite a few things you can do to reduce memory usage.

Stream Framework now running on Python 3.4!

Users of the open source Stream-Framework often ask us if they should use Redis or Cassandra to power their newsfeed. This article highlights five scenarios in which you are better off going for Cassandra.