barkinet/engineering-blog

📝 We write about our technologies and the problems we handle at scale.

Grab Engineering Blog

Welcome to Grab's official engineering blog where we share the good engineering practices in Grab and the things we engineers do that can benefit other engineers in the industry. Comments and feedback are welcome!

Getting Started

The blog runs on Jekyll, an awesome static site builder that is written in Ruby. To get started, clone the repository and run the following steps:

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec jekyll serve

Navigate to http://localhost:4000 to view the blog. A process runs in the background to watch for changes made to the code. Simply refresh the page to see the updated changes. If you are new to Jekyll, we would recommend that you check out their detailed documentation here.

Contributing

Interested in writing a blog entry to the blog? Simply fork the repository and make a pull request with the new entry, a markdown file in the _posts folder with the name YYYY-MM-DD-your-title.md.

Adding Authors

If you are a new author, add your bio to _data/authors.yml, for example:

lian-yuanlin: # This is the ID of the author
  name: Lian Yuanlin
  thumbnail: /img/authors/lian-yuanlin.jpg # Use a remote image or add your own image
  github: alienchow # Github Username (optional)

Writing your post

Each post should have the following front matter defined:

Property	Explanation	Example
layout	The layout template from the _layouts directory. We only have post for now.	post
id	Unique id for each blog entry. This is used by Disqus to uniquely identify posts and should not be modified if a Disqus thread for that post already exists.	curious-case-of-the-phantom-instance
title	Title of blog entry	The Curious Case of The Phantom Instance
date	Date of entry in DDDD-MM-YY HH:MM:SS format	2015-12-28 04:39:00
authors	YAML list of author IDs. The author bio will be retrieved from _data/authors.yml and displayed within the post.	[lian-yuanlin, ...]
categories	YAML list of categories, sorted alphabetically. Only use existing categories in _data/categories.yml.	[Engineering]
tags	YAML list of tags, sorted alphabetically. Please check existing tags on /tags and reuse where possible.	[AWS, Golang]
cover_photo	Relative URL to the FB open graph image	/img/grab-vietnam-careers-week/son-hai.jpg
comments	Whether to display Disqus comments box. Why would you set this to false?	true
excerpt	Your catchy excerpt that will be shown on the list of blog entries page. Wrap your excerpt in quotes if it spans across multiple lines.	"Here at the Grab Engineering team, we have built our entire backend stack on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Over time, it was inevitable that some habits have started to form when perceiving our backend monitoring statistics."

Proceed to write your blog entry in Github-flavoured Markdown format. Should you want to add images to your blog entry, the files should be added to the img/<post-id> folder.

When you are done with your entry, simply make a pull request and ping us in the #eng-bloggers Slack channel to request for a review!

That's it, happy blogging!

Deployment

Since we are using custom plugins (such as for authors), Github will not build and deploy the generated site for us. We use a custom gem jgd meant for deploying Jekyll pages manually. Simply run this command to build the site and pushes it to the gh-pages branch.

$ jgd

License

MIT License