Implementing and scaling automated accessibility testing on REI.com

The Front-end Build System (FEBS) is REI’s internally developed set of tools that helps engineers build the assets that are eventually downloaded by customers visiting REI’s online properties. FEBS...

At REI, the Cybersecurity Engineering teams constantly work hand in hand with our application and infrastructure teams. The outdoor analogy that sometimes comes to mind is that the Cybersecurity En...

Days before the holiday sales change freeze, the web performance and analytics teams deployed a change that drastically improved front-end performance. A new configuration on a third-party script l...

It’s not me, it’s you.

When I came from the REI Network Engineering team to join our Cloud Shared Services team, I was excited to find all theways to automate tasks in a DevOps world. I was tasked with creating the netwo...

We recently released a new major version our internal microservice framework(Crampon) that included lots of major changes.In this release we made the jump to Java 11 (from 8) which meant upgrading ...

What is a front-end build system?

Here at REI, we take site reliability seriously. But as a company with anextensive CI/CD stack we want to be able to make changes and deploy as needed.Sometimes, there can be conflict between these...

In The Beginning . . .

A significant piece of our Alpine Platform is thedeployment service we call Sherpa. It’s capable of deploying to both on premise and AWS with a blue-greendeployment strategy. The cloud is particula...

As we began moving apps up into AWS we were challenged by the security team to “harden” the AMI used for our ec2 instances, we were already thinking of using HashiCorp Terraform for infra as code, ...

Creating projects from scratch can be a significant chore. In order to simplify it tools such asthe Maven Archetype plugin can be used to generate a project stub from a template. At REI we’ve used ...

At REI, like many companies these days we’ve been on a journey to refactor our monolithic application into microservices.A huge accelerator for us in this endeavor has been our homegrown micro-serv...

We have been practicing continuous deployment for a while now. At this point it is entrenched in our cultureand our tools and almost difficult to remember our workflow prior to the switch. Of cou...

At REI we like to measure everything. We record thousands of metrics across all of our services and applications for avariety of things ranging from datasource usage to request timing. For metrics ...

Welcome to our new REI Engineering site! Technology plays a key role in our mission to inspire, educate, and outfit our members for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. It’s in our bloo...