Welcome!
Today we are officially launching our new Technology Blog to the public!
Each month, we plan to share articles written by our different technologists about the cool ways their teams are using new technologies to provide you with the best weather services in Canada, Spain, and other countries where we operate.
Yes, besides our well-known Canadian Web and Apps (and TV) from The Weather Network (or MeteoMedia in French), we also operate the #1 weather Apps and Website in Spain as ElTiempo.es! Yes, we are already incubating several cool new Sites and Apps in other countries too. 😉
We want to give back to the Tech community and will begin to share with you the tools, techniques, frameworks, approaches, etc that we have tried, what we have learned — sometimes the hard way, and what we have adopted into production — all to help you understand how to best use these same technologies and approaches where you work.
You already know we provide localized weather to millions of users across Canada (and Spain and other countries too) updated in near real-time, but you probably underestimate the technology required to make it all possible.
We don’t just get consumer-ready data from someone like Environment Canada and pump it into our Web and Apps. We build and operate our own sophisticated end-to-end infrastructure that ingests multiple primary weather supercomputer models from across the globe, then combines them using proprietary meteorological algorithms developed by our team of Meteorologists, and then distributes to our millions of users on Web and iOS/Android/TV Apps and TV/Video streaming services.
We have the unique technical challenge of operating one of the highest-trafficked Canadian Sites and Apps with tens of millions of users monthly and intense bursts of Web and App traffic during active weather storms. Beside this high scale, we need consistent high performance too — alerts and short-term forecasts that Must be delivered lightning fast — while being as cost efficient as possible. To accomplish this we use all three major Cloud providers deliberately for different processing, as well as major CDNs for global content distribution.
Finally but importantly, we in Technology work closely with our Product Mgmt and UX Design colleagues in combined Agile teams in a totally open-concept space we call the “Clubhouse.” I am writing this blog as CTO sitting at my desk in the Clubhouse really no different from that of any other developer. So we look forward to sharing lots about our experiences working in this exciting new way.
Over the months to come, some of the other topics we’ll be sharing will include:
- How we do Agile/Scrum Process
- How we ingest, process and distribute our Vast Meteorological Data
- How we built and use Automated CI/CD Pipelines through Dev/Test/Staging
- How we use Web frameworks and CMSs
- How (and why 😉 ) we use the different Cloud platforms to do different things
- How we protect User Privacy and Security
- Interviews with some of our Developers
Thanks for checking us out and please subscribe to our RSS feed. We totally welcome any suggestions or topics you want to hear about in future postings! This blog is about helping you all learn from what we have done!
Alex
