In this first post on how we test software at Quid, my aim is to tease out different layers of testing built into our development process, and to call out when, where and how tests should be added, and most importantly, who should come up with them.
Read MoreQuid Hackathon II
Earlier this year, the Technology team at Quid participated in the second Quidathon. The two day event was particularly memorable as it was the last bit of innovation in our old office. As with each Quidathon, there are only two rules: learn something new and have fun! Projects can range anywhere from implementing prototypes of new features, to exploring alternative technologies. We saw sixteen projects this time. Here are a few: Visual Search: Explored an alternative workflow for our product by combining the search and visualization aspects together. Users were able to instantly generate a network from their search allowing for quick iteration and exploration. Sharable Quid: Project began by providing the ability to share Quid layouts through embeddable images and eventually resulted in a fully interactive, annotated slideshow of insights users could share on blogs and social media sites. Explicit Netgen: At Quid we excel at uncovering implicit relationships between unstructured text documents. The goal of this project was to explore the explicit relationships between entities. For instance, which investors have invested in the same companies and what does the corporate board membership landscape look like? The team implemented an explicit network generator which incorporated steps to prune connections […]
Read MoreHere’s a suggestion
Search at Quid is recognized as one of the most valuable yet challenging areas within our product. It serves as the vehicle through which our users first engage with the product, and also serves as an integral part in helping our users derive insight. The results from a user search are fed to both our network generation and clustering algorithms, as well as the beautiful visualizations described in previous blog posts. Suggested terms are just one of the ways we enhance the search experience for our users, enabling the creation of more complex queries faster. This post will be the first in a series of blogs highlighting some of the unique challenges faced by Quid’s Platform Search team. In this post we will give a brief peek into how we approach suggested terms at Quid. The Use Case Every search engine these days, from Facebook to Google, provides some form of suggestions. Users have come to both expect and rely on this functionality as an extension of search. For Quid, this meant let’s not reinvent the wheel, but let’s also make sure our suggestions serve the correct function within our application. Our use case involved solving for the following: * Low […]
Read MoreOptimizing The Rendering Engine
Quid strives to power human intuition by delivering vast quantities of data and their connections through network visualizations. Those networks are usually made of nodes and edges. Lots of them. To enable our customers to visualize, navigate and manipulate these big networks in their browser, a question naturally arises: how can we render those nodes and edges as fast as possible? WebGL To The Rescue WebGL lends the power of the computer’s GPU to the web browser which affords processing large amounts of geometric data quickly in parallel. However, WebGL’s rather rudimentary set of APIs focused largely on drawing points, lines, and triangles, which makes our life difficult when drawing curved edges. Rendering edges with lines is quickly rejected due to the WebGL’s poor support of line endings and joints1. What if we draw triangles? First thought in mind would be to divide the curve into multiple segments and fit each of them with a quadrilateral (quad), which is rendered as two triangles. We increase the number of segments until the curve is smooth enough. Bartosz Ciechanowski describes this approach in his article “Drawing Bézier Curves”2. Although this would work if we had only tens or hundreds of edges to […]
Read MoreQuid Hackathon
Quid hosted its first internal hackathon, a Quidathon, back in late November. Teams of engineers, product managers, and designers had 48 hours to see their ideas become a reality. We required only two things of participants. First, have fun! And second, attempt to learn something new. Before our two day event was over, the entire company gathered round to watch each team present their project. Below are a few of the awesome projects that emerged. Quid Touch: A touch compatible version of Quid’s web application (using a 55″ touch display found in Quid’s office). User Activity Heat Map: An interactive user activity heat map within Quid’s data visualization application. Mobile Quid: A mobile version of Quid’s web application. Embedded Quid: A lightweight version of Quid’s web application that can be embedded in any webpage. Smart Search: A “smart” version of Quid Search which took advantage of a generated taxonomy and a query to generate a context based suggestion. Everyone at Quid was excited to see the projects Quidizens created in such a short time. We look forward to seeing what the future has in store for a few of these. And even more, we look forward to […]
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