Blog: Instawork Engineering

Django Settings In the Cloud

Feb. 19, 2019 » Instawork Engineering » [Archived Version]

At Instawork we have multiple different environments (test, development, staging, production) and we have quite a few different Django…Continue reading on Instawork Engineering »

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Iterating with Simplicity: Evolving a Django app with Intercooler.js

Oct. 24, 2018 » Instawork Engineering » [Archived Version]

About a year ago, Instawork started experimenting with a new product called Gigs. Gigs lets restaurants and caterers fill on-demand shifts with pre-qualified dishwashers, cooks, and servers from Instawork’s network of professionals. Our MVP was little more than a Google form to request shifts. This worked OK in the early days, but as the product took off, it became clear we needed a web dashboard for managers to view and edit their gigs.Our existing web dashboard (a hiring app for full time job…

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Elegant Database Migrations on ECS

April 3, 2018 » Instawork Engineering » [Archived Version]

“Birds flying away” by elPadawan / CC BY SAOver the last few months, the Instawork engineering team has been moving our AWS infrastructure from manually deployed EC2 instances to an Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster managed with CI/CD. The benefit is clear: as our engineering team and traffic grow, automated deployments and auto-scaling free us up from worrying about dev-ops and allow us to focus on product improvements.The core functionality of ECS works really well:We push a new Docker …

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