Crypto Shuttle News

Month: December 2021

  • Scaling Content at Coinbase

    Scaling Content at Coinbase

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    By Clay Kohut, Senior Software Engineer

    TLDR: Over the past year, Coinbase has invested in tooling to eliminate static content across our web frontend. This is the story of how we did it and why it’s important.

    Coinbase Learn(ed)

    The Coinbase educational portal, Coinbase Learn, launched in late 2020. Learn contains hundreds of beginner guides, practical tutorials, and market updates and is maintained by a dedicated team of content editors.

    Our engineers explored various options for powering Learn. Ideally, we wanted a solution that would allow us to seamlessly integrate content into the Coinbase logged out experience.

    Hosted options for blog-like content such as Medium provided too little flexibility.

    The WordPress framework was too opinionated and directly tied to the UI.

    We ended up opting for a headless CMS, specifically Contentful. Contentful is a content platform that delivers a headless approach to content as well as backend extensibility to integrate with our preferred tools and ways of working. Being “headless” means the CMS is UI agnostic — it separates the content from the experience, simply providing structured JSON to the frontend, which allows for us to totally control the frontend experience.

    Integrating with Contentful was simply a matter of creating data structures representing different types of content (via the Contentful UI) and then mapping those data structures to React components (which handled actually rendering the data)

    Our initial CMS architecture

    Donning the Flightsuit

    With Coinbase Learn under our belt and the Coinbase Direct Public Offering (DPO) on the horizon, a cohesion initiative kicked off (deemed Project Flightsuit). Project Flightsuit sought to bring a cohesive look and feel across Coinbase logged out properties as well as enforcing design standards across newly created landing pages.

    While investigating the state of the Coinbase product landing pages, we uncovered 40 product surfaces spread across 15 different repositories / frontend applications. The various frontends were built using a variety of technologies — everything from React with Typescript (our current standard) to legacy Ruby on Rails templates, to static HTML.

    A peek of our “Page Architecture” overview document

    Leveraging the Contentful integration initially set up for Coinbase Learn, we began to create a set of “blocks” which could be used to standardize landing page layouts (while aligning around our new brand guidelines).

    “Blocks,” also known as content types, are high-level components which combine to create landing pages. For example, a “Hero” block might contain a “Title”, “Subtitle” and “CTA Button” in the CMS, which corresponds to a React component on the frontend.

    A “Hero Block” data structure (left) and the corresponding React component (right)

    By creating a thoughtful “Block-based system” (and reworking our existing landing pages to use this system), we were able to efficiently migrate nearly all landing pages to a single frontend application, powered by React, and integrated with Contentful.

    Once the block system was in place, migrating pages was a relatively simple task of dragging / dropping various blocks via the Contentful UI, and redirecting the old page routes to the new, CMS-driven alternative.

    1, 2, Automate

    Post-Project Flightsuit, our team focused on improving the usability and resiliency of the CMS. A few lessons learned:

    1. Making the CMS easy-to-use for non-technical team members is extremely important. With our first pass at CMS landing pages, we had created some data structures with advanced features (such as generic layout creation) which were mostly only understood and serviceable by Engineers (thus defeating the main value prop of the CMS). We countered this by favoring editor experience above all else. By automating advanced features within Contentful wherever possible (such as automatically determining which layout would best suit a set of content), we could allow editors to focus on editing rather than building.
    2. By integrating with Contentful (a third party), our frontends became dependent upon Contentful’s uptime. Contentful has a very consistent track record of nearly 100% uptime, but this reliance was challenged when Contentful experienced two outages due to some widespread DNS issues. (To be fair to Contentful, these outages were also experienced by some of the world’s largest websites and were the only instances we’ve seen where Contentful was unavailable). To ensure availability of our higher visibility pages (such as our homepage), we determined the best path forward was to introduce a reverse API proxy which leverages the stale-if-error header, in order for our CDN to serve cached content if the upstream call happens to fail. This allows us to stay up even if the CMS goes down (for X number of days).
    Above: Our CMS architecture before and after adding the cached reverse proxy

    3. Training new engineering teams on working with and extending the CMS was a primary focus. My team had become the sole source of knowledge of an increasingly-used system and were often sourced to onboard new engineers to the system on a one-off basis. To better spread the knowledge of the framework, we developed the CMS Ambassador Program, which aimed to train and bring together subject matter experts for the CMS throughout the company. The program begins with a 1.5 hour structured workshop where attendees learn the ins and outs of integrating with the CMS. While this program is currently driven in real-time and onboarding sessions are held as-needed, we are currently in the process of converting this to a self-service course via an internal training tool.

    A snapshot of our internal CMS Ambassador workshop

    Key Results

    As 2021 comes to a close, we’re proud to look back at how far we’ve come over the past year. Here is the progress we’ve seen after successfully implementing our company-wide CMS:

    • Landing page creation time reduced from an average of 2 weeks to less than one day.
    • Content change turnaround time reduced from an hour-long process of code change/review/merge/deploy to under 10 mins, and without engineering involvement.
    • By the end of year, 90% of all top level surfaces will be covered. This means that nearly all top-level, logged out product surfaces on Coinbase will be powered via Contentful by end of year.

    These efficiency gains have been achieved thanks largely to our leadership’s investment in infra and developer tooling. Coinbase truly cares about engineering excellence, developer experience, and automating routine processes.

    We also couldn’t have achieved this without the hard work of some astoundingly thoughtful, talented individuals (each of whom I’m incredibly proud to work with):

    • Leon Haggarty, Askat Bakyev, João Melo, Stephen Lee, Wilhelm Willie, Bryant Gallardo, Guiherme Luersen, Raymond Sohn, Leonardo Zizzamia, Christopher Nascone (Eng)
    • Bobby Rasmusson, Russ Ballard (Product)
    • Ananth Chandrasekharan, Goutham Buchi, Manish Gupta (EVP of Eng)

    We’re all excited to enter 2022 with a shiny, unified frontend and minimal one-off content change requests on the horizon. If you’re interested in joining Coinbase, check out our Careers page here. Here’s to a happy new year!

    Scaling Content at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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  • digital cities, attacks on female creators, and more

    digital cities, attacks on female creators, and more

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    Following the announcement that Facebook’s parent company would be rebranding in a shift towards the metaverse, many projects have started similar initiatives entering the virtual space, from buying property to testing the limits of what this universe has to offer. 

    Digital cities: Santa Monica and Seoul

    The Downtown Santa Monica District west of Los Angeles was one of the first real-world areas to allow users to have access to the metaverse through the FlickPlay app. Branded as a metaverse tool, walking around the district seems to be more of a limited augmented reality experience rather than a virtual one, with people collecting digital tokens in the style of Pokémon GO.

    In contrast, Seoul’s entry into the metaverse is expected to be a 100% virtual environment once launched in early 2023. In November, the local government announced it would be starting its own platform, Metaverse Seoul, slowly integrating services related to the economy, culture, education and civil complaints. In addition, the Korean capital planned to create virtual versions of its major tourist attractions and hold festivals in the metaverse.

    Seoul, South Korea. Source: author

    Does Meta have a ‘women problem’?

    Following the launch of Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality game and online community platform released by Meta — formerly Facebook — at least one user reported that the virtual environment allowed sexual harassment. In a Dec. 16 report from MIT Technology Review, one of Horizon’s beta testers said a stranger had groped her avatar. Though there is a feature capable of encasing an avatar in a protective bubble to seemingly stop such an attack, the user was either unable to activate it in time, or was otherwise unaware of it.

    “At the end of the day, the nature of virtual-reality spaces is such that it is designed to trick the user into thinking they are physically in a certain space, that their every bodily action is occurring in a 3D environment,” said Katherine Cross, an online harassment researcher at the University of Washington. “It’s part of the reason why emotional reactions can be stronger in that space, and why VR triggers the same internal nervous system and psychological responses.”

    In November, another woman reported her metaverse persona under attack, this time without the use of avatars and with seemingly more real-world effects on her business. When Facebook rebranded to Meta, Australian artist Thea-Mai Baumann reported being locked out of her Instagram account. Her handle? “Metaverse.”

    Source: Thea-Mai Baumann’s Instagram account, “metaverse”

    Because Meta owns Instagram and Baumann’s account was relatively small — fewer than 1,000 followers at the time — many on social media suspected the company would simply seize her account rather than buy it. She ended up being locked out for more than a month without being able to verify her identity before Instagram restored access.

    “This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn’t want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet,” said Baumann. “That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time.”

    Companies going meta

    On Dec. 10, Chinese internet giant Baidu announced plans to launch its own metaverse product, called XiRang, a universe capable of handling input from 100,000 users where it also plans to host an AI developer conference. The Baidu Create conference is expected to be held on Dec. 27.

    A city in Baidu’s metaverse. Source: Baidu

    Sports footwear and apparel manufacturer Nike’s products are officially going virtual following the acquisition of virtual sneakers and collectibles brand RTFKT this week. RTFKT, which describes itself as “fully formed in the metaverse,” will likely help Nike advance its own plans to “just do it.”

    Facebook whistleblower issues metaverse warning

    Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who turned over thousands of documents that implied that the company was not doing what it claimed in regard to removing hate speech and posts encouraging violence, voiced her concerns about the metaverse. In a Dec. 16 newsletter released by Time magazine, Haugen said she was “super scared” about the potential risks of the virtual world for surveillance, socializing, and more:

    “When you go into the metaverse, your avatar is a little more handsome or pretty than yourself. You have better clothes than we have in reality. The apartment is more stylish, more calm. And you take your headset off and you go to brush your teeth at the end of the night. And maybe you just don’t like yourself in the mirror as much. That cycle… I’m super worried that people are going to look at their apartment, which isn’t as nice, and look at their face or their body, which isn’t as nice, and say: ‘I would rather have my headset on.’”