Clearcode Archives - Clearcode

Clearcode Gets Acquired by Qinshift

Mike Sweeney — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 10:06:27 +0000

It’s with great pleasure that we announce today that we’ve been acquired by Qinshift.

Qinshift (formerly Aricoma) is an emerging pan-European IT services player backed by KKCG, a private investment company with €7 billion of assets under management.

It’s been an incredible journey for Clearcode and its people since being founded in 2009 by Maciej Zawadziński and Dominik Jendroszczyk and we’re super excited for the next chapter of our history.

What started off as a small team of 10 developers has grown to over 100 team members across development, management, marketing, sales, HR and finance.

Over the past 13 years, we’ve had the absolute pleasure of working with some of the biggest companies in various industries to design and build innovative advertising and marketing software. We can’t wait to achieve even more success as part of Qinshift.

View our case studies here.

For Clearcode and its people, the acquisition will turbocharge our growth plans over the next few years, bring more business opportunities, and allow us to expand quicker into new markets and industries.

For Clearcode’s present and future clients, the acquisition will allow us to offer more services, especially around data processing, data science and machine learning, which are increasingly playing a bigger role in programmatic advertising and digital marketing.

Clearcode’s day-to-day operations and organisational structure will continue as normal but will benefit from ongoing support and access to ARICOMA’s business connections.

We’ll continue to specialize in AdTech and MarTech development and help tech companies, agencies and publishers build new products to meet their business needs and solve the various challenges they face.

Read more about the acquisition here:

KKCG’s ARICOMA Group Acquires Ad Tech and Martech Development Company Clearcode – ExchangeWire

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Clearcode Launches an R&D Lab. Q&A with Clearcode’s CEO, CCO, and Head of Engineering

Mike Sweeney — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:51:35 +0000

Clearcode recently announced the launch of its R&D Lab to further help companies build innovative advertising and marketing technologies, and solve the many technical challenges facing the industries.

To get some insights into the decision around creating the R&D Lab, what the R&D Lab will do, and how it can help companies wanting to design and build AdTech & MarTech platforms, we asked Clearcode’s CEO, COO, and Head of Engineering a few questions.

Why did we create the R&D Lab and how did the decision to create it come about?

PB: Although R&D has always been a core part of our company, the time came to centralize these activities to provide more value to our clients and maintain consistent knowledge sharing within our company.

TC: R&D at Clearcode has been done on a team and project level, which worked well for us, but we felt that we could achieve a lot more if we created a dedicated team that would focus solely on R&D for multiple projects.

GŁ: The idea to create an R&D Lab had been on the cards for a while, but the growing challenges in AdTech (e.g. the end of third-party cookies) motivated us to speed up the process.

Who is part of the R&D Lab currently and what experience and skills do they bring to the R&D Lab?

PB: Our R&D Lab includes some of Clearcode’s most experienced and knowledgeable software architects, engineers, and managers.

TC: They’ve been at our company for a long time and have a lot of experience and knowledge of AdTech development, but also cloud-computing services (e.g. AWS).

GŁ: The R&D Lab members have a real talent and specific attitude to solving different problems, testing them, and applying them to our clients’ projects.

What will the R&D Lab be responsible for?

PB: The R&D Lab will have a range of responsibilities, but the main ones will be assisting with new projects and sharing knowledge with the other development teams in Clearcode.

TC: They’ll also cooperate with our partners to tackle complex tasks and in the future contribute to industry organizations to help develop new standards for the digital advertising and marketing industries.

GŁ: A big part of the R&D Lab will also be to help our clients improve their existing tech (e.g. by improving performance) and build innovative AdTech and MarTech platforms.

How can Clearcode’s clients benefit from the R&B Lab?

PB: One of the main reasons why clients partner with us is because of our domain knowledge, experience, and skills in designing and building AdTech and MarTech platforms, and this will only continue to be strengthened with our R&D Lab.

TC: Being a development partner to our clients, we focus on building tech that meets their business and technical requirements, but the R&D Lab will also propose solutions and approaches that will deliver more value to our clients’ businesses.

GŁ: The R&D Lab will take a proactive approach to solving industry challenges and work on identifying, researching, and providing solutions to problems that our clients might not even be aware of.

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Clearcode’s 10-Year Anniversary [infographic]

Mike Sweeney — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 04:28:08 +0000

Like all startup stories, ours had a humble beginning.

Back in July 2009 when Clearcode was founded, a small team of people worked in a 32m office in Wroclaw. Now, we have over 80 employees (plus over 100 in our sister company, Piwik PRO), 2 offices in Wroclaw and Katowice, plus numerous employees working remotely around the world.

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we created an infographic to illustrate how far we’ve come over the past 10 years and share a few interesting facts about Clearcode and our people.

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Clearcode Joins the AWS Partner Network Program

Mike Sweeney — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 13:43:27 +0000

Although AdTech and MarTech companies like AdRoll, Smaato, and CleverTap vary in terms of features, they all share a common thread; they all use Amazon Web Services (AWS).

When it comes to leaders of the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, AWS owns the top spot with a 47% market share — that’s 25% higher than second-placed Microsoft Azure (22%).

Since 2009, Clearcode has been helping companies design, build, and maintain advertising and marketing technologies, including demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, data management platforms (DMPs), and many others.

A majority of our client and internal projects (approx. 80%) have been built using AWS.

By joining the AWS Partner Network (APN) and becoming a verified Consulting Partner, we’ve strengthened the development services we offer to our clients.

About the AWS Partner Network Program

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a partner program designed for companies that either help companies build software (e.g. software development companies) or build their own software (e.g. software product companies) using Amazon Web Services.

APN provides partners with access to exclusive access to technical documentation, materials, and support services.

How Clearcode’s Partnership With AWS Can Help You

Our software engineers and DevOps are experienced in AWS and have been building new AdTech/MarTech platforms using AWS, as well as improving the performance of existing tools and web applications by optimizing their AWS infrastructure, for many years.

By becoming a verified AWS Consulting Partner, we’ve strengthened our AdTech and MarTech development services.

What AWS Technical Services Can We Offer You?

Custom AdTech and MarTech Development

We can help you design, develop, and maintain high-performance and scalable AdTech and MarTech platforms that are built using Amazon Web Services.

Infrastructure Optimization

Our development teams can improve the performance of your existing AdTech or MarTech platforms by making optimizations to your platform’s AWS, architecture, and code base.

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Clearcode’s Piwik PRO Awarded Deloitte Technology Fast 50

Michal Wlosik — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 09:33:28 +0000

Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Central Europe honors technology companies with the biggest revenue-growth over the period of four consecutive years. Piwik PRO’s impressive 593% growth awarded the company 20th place in this year’s ranking. At Clearcode, we are incredibly proud of our sister company, and happy to be able to share the credit for its success.

About Deloitte Technology Fast 50

The Fast 50 Central Europe ranking is part of EMEA Fast 500 report prepared by Deloitte each year. Nominees are chosen per their financial performance. The ranking’s main category is reserved for companies:

Headquartered in Central Europe
Technology focused
Owning the technology on which the product is based
Having a specific share structure that excludes the majority of foreign strategic investors

Apart from 18 Polish startups, there were eight companies from Latvia, seven from Croatia and the Czech Republic, three from Slovakia, and two from Hungary. Lithuania, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Estonia were represented by one startup each.

Piwik PRO’s Maciej Zawadzinski and Piotr Korzeniowski receiving the award at the official Deloitte gala.

Piwik PRO and Clearcode

Clearcode and Piwik PRO share more than just an office. Piwik PRO’s success is, in fact, partly our own – the product was launched by Clearcode as a commercial platform in 2013. Initially building upon the features of the open-source version of the solution, Piwik eventually fleshed out into a completely separate, proprietary product designed to meet the needs of large enterprises and governments.

The Road to Success

When starting our work on Piwik, we quickly noticed that its many users, mainly large corporations and governments, needed specific features that were absent from the self-hosted version.

The open source product helped us to gain first clients, but we soon felt the growing need to build and develop our own platform. We followed our intuition, and decided to focus on the needs of privacy-sensitive markets. As a result, we added a number of premium features for Piwik PRO’s cloud and on-premises versions, providing our clients with advanced reporting, admin, and customization capabilities.

Today, Piwik PRO is a successful, independent business with over 100 employees, but we still share the same know-how and company culture, and take pride in its successes.

Read more about how we built Piwik PRO in a comprehensive case study.

The Award

Piwik PRO’s CEO and cofounder Maciej Zawadziński and CFO Piotr Korzeniowski, who jointly received the award in Warsaw, openly express their enthusiasm:

“These have been four years of hard work for all our team but I would not expect it to be noticed by anyone but our clients. I am very happy that our efforts towards protecting privacy stand out and are appreciated internationally” – said Zawadziński.

“Being the 20th fastest growing technology company in Central Europe means that we are doing great, but it also means that next year we can do even better. Both as a business partner for our clients and as a global web and app analytics player raising awareness and providing solutions that enable more ethical data usage” – added Korzeniowski.

The Future

It makes us extremely proud to stand at the forefront of technology in Europe and have contributed to the success of one of Deloitte laureate companies that sets standards of excellence and innovation in the industry.

The award means a lot to us, but we also know we can never rest on our laurels and carry the flame of innovation into the future.

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Ask Us Anything About AdTech and MarTech

Mike Sweeney — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 12:51:36 +0000

Understanding the fundamentals of online advertising and marketing technology is complex — there are numerous initialisms to learn (e.g. CPA and eCPM), various ways of buying media (e.g. RTB and programmatic direct), as well as dozens of technology platforms (e.g. DSPs and SSPs).

If you have questions that you can’t find the answers to, then send them to us and we’ll try our best to answer them.

Here are just some of the topics you can ask us about:

AdTech and MarTech platforms like DSPs, SSPs, ad exchanges, CDPs, etc.
AdTech processes like cookie syncing, real-time bidding, and header bidding.
Privacy laws like the GDPR, CCPA, and ePrivacy.
Privacy settings in web browsers like Safari’s ITP, Firefox’s ETP, and Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox.

Click on the blue button below to send us your questions:

Ask Us Anything about AdTech & MarTech

If you have a question about the programmatic advertising, AdTech & MarTech undustries, then get in contact with our team

Got Questions About AdTech and MarTech Development?

You can also ask us questions related to AdTech and MarTech development, such as:

Designing and building AdTech and MarTech platforms from scratch — DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, CDPs, etc.
Integrating your existing platform with others in the ecosystem — e.g. integrating your DSP with SSPs and ad exchanges.
Improving the performance of your existing software by optimizing the infrastructure (e.g. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform).
Building on top of APIs to create reporting and campaign management dashboards.
Incorporating new processes into your technology — e.g. cookie syncing and header bidding.

You can send us your questions about AdTech and MarTech development by clicking on the red button above or via our contact page.

About Clearcode

We are a full-service software development house specializing in AdTech and MarTech.

Since 2009, we’ve designed, built, and maintained custom advertising and marketing software for both clients, as well as for our own ventures, such as Piwik PRO.

With offices in the US and Europe, our teams have partnered with agencies, vendors, and brands, to build real-time bidding (RTB), programmatic, data management, and analytics platforms for their in-house teams and clients.

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AdTech/MarTech Development and the Vicious Cycle Plaguing Vendors and Agencies

Maciej Zawadziński — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 12:34:46 +0000

Despite the efficiencies, automation, and scale advertising and marketing technology bring to the online world, there’s no shortage of problems with these industries. Ad fraud, a lack of transparency around fees and commissions, and the GDPR are just a few of the external privacy issues they face today.

AdTech/MarTech vendors and agencies face a number of internal problems as well:

AdTech and MarTech vendors: Maintaining a competitive edge over their rivals and delivering value to their clients.
Agencies: Reducing commissions paid to vendors and intermediaries, eliminating fees associated with using white-labelled platforms, gaining transparency into media-buying processes, and maintaining control and ownership of their data.

During discussions I’ve had over the years with company leaders, from CEOs to VPs of Technology, I’ve found that apart from their own unique challenges, they all experience the same vicious cycle when it comes to their technology.

Can you relate?

1. Too Many Client Requests, Too Few Hours In the Day

It doesn’t really matter at which stage your product is in its life cycle, you’ll no doubt have an unlimited supply of new feature requests and changes proposed by clients. As your product and company grows, this amount of requests only increases, especially when you start attracting large, high-paying clients.

The hard truth is that no amount of venture funding or equity capital can buy more hours in the day. However, you can put that money towards development resources to build the features your clients are requesting and develop new tools to expand your client offering.

Unfortunately, this is often where you’ll encounter the second problem.

2. Not Enough Resources to Expand the Core Product or Build New Features and Tools

Regardless of whether you want to build the features your clients are requesting, expand your technology, or develop new tools, putting together the right amount of development resources is a real challenge.

On top of that you have the problem of maintaining the platform (performance monitoring and ensuring compatibility with the latest versions of APIs, etc.), which can easily eat up half of your available resources.

When it comes to increasing the number of development resources, most AdTech/MarTech vendors and agencies typically explore the following two options:

Work with a body-leasing or generic software development company
Hire developers directly

While these options may seem like an ideal solution at the time, they often bring with them a world of new issues—which leads to the third problem.

3. A Lack of Experienced and Skilled AdTech/MarTech Developers

Once you’ve identified that you need more development resources to push your technology forward and then gone about obtaining more developers, it won’t be long before this stark realization sets in—the developers have no idea what they are doing.

Designing, building, and maintaining advertising and marketing technology is not like any other area of software development; there’s a long and steep learning curve associated with understanding the complex inner workings of AdTech and MarTech platforms. It often takes a developer years to develop a strong command of this area, and hiring or working with inexperienced and unskilled developers has the potential to bring with it serious consequences.

We’ve had numerous clients come to us with an existing platform that was built by an inexperienced development team. Often, the code and the overall structure (certain processes that were not implemented according to industry standards, for example) were so unmanageable that we would have to scrap the whole thing and start again.

As the saying goes — “if you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur”.

So, What’s the Solution?

Each business is different and what works for one company might not work for another.

For some, adding another one or two developers with some AdTech/MarTech experience might be sufficient, while others may need a whole team.

However, if your AdTech/MarTech company or agency is in need of more development resources, do yourself a favor and make sure that three-letter acronyms aren’t foreign to them.

Is your AdTech/MarTech company or agency experiencing similar problems? Do you lack the experience and skilled resources needed to push your technology forward? Feel free to contact us and have a chat about the technical challenges you are facing. Clearcode might be able to help.

About Clearcode

Clearcode is a full-service AdTech and MarTech development company. We partner with vendors and agencies to design, build, and maintain high-performance advertising and marketing technology.

Since 2009, we’ve built all kinds of technology for companies of all sizes, from demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) to data- and customer-management platforms (DMPs and CDPs), and developed custom solutions (reporting and campaign management dashboards) by integrating existing software with other AdTech and MarTech platforms.

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Clearcode’s Development Pipeline: The Tools and Services We Use to Build Software

Rafał Grzebyk — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 09:44:47 +0000

When it comes to developing software, there are a vast number of tools and solutions that can help you better deal with application deployments. Over time, these solutions change depending on our client’s needs and our knowledge of a specific tool.

There’s also the desire to try something new, especially when it looks promising. On top of that, every developer has their own preferred operating system, favorite tools, and even habits.

To make everyone happy, we use basic stuff like bash scripts and Ansible playbooks. There’s nothing overall fancy here, and we mainly apply methods that aren’t tied to any specific platform or solution — we’re not reinventing the wheel.

In this post, we outline the tools and services we use in our development pipeline, explain why we use them, and offer some helpful tips along the way.

A Brief Overview of Our Development Approach

As Clearcode is a full-service software development company, most of our teams have a dedicated DevOps engineer. However, developers are allowed, and even strongly encouraged, to do some DevOps-related tasks on their own.

Moreover, with the increasing number of team members coming on board, handling deployment tasks is an unquestionable benefit.

As a team, we want to write, test, and deploy applications on every existing platform without changing the whole deployment process.

Also, projects should be run, tested, and built on every developer’s own equipment. This can be helpful when working remotely from locations without Internet access or when all current build agent slots are busy and builds are queued.

To help developers gain new skills and expand existing ones, knowledge sharing within and outside of the company is a crucial part of our development pipeline, which typically involves weekly tech meetings where we present and discuss new solutions.

We are not afraid to change anything in our pipeline and we always try to experiment with new technologies. If it works for us, we will stick with it. We don’t adopt these solutions to old projects, but we apply them to every new project.

The Tools and Services We Use in Our Development Pipeline

As a company, we work with clients from all over the world. Most of them have their own infrastructures, whether that be Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure or even bare-metal instances.

This means we have to carefully choose the tools and services we use to ensure they are compatible with the various cloud-computing services.

Below are the main tools and services we use in our development pipeline.

Docker

We simply love Docker.

We use Docker extensively, from local development to production deployments. Setting up a working environment in Docker is far easier than creating OS-specific approaches. If you can run Docker containers, that should be enough.

Last year we used Docker containers for a large majority of our projects. We were able to schedule the newly written apps to run on various Docker platforms.

This means that we have one deployment routine, regardless of the application. Of course, there are many different languages and framework-specific approaches to Docker apps, but essentially it’s just a container image pushed to some repository that needs to be run on some Docker-compatible platform.

Running Docker containers on AWS EC2 Container Service is a good start.

ECS tasks helped us a lot. Creating task definitions via AWS console or API is a trivial thing to do. Still, it demands some basic understanding, like how to launch an application, assign all permissions, mount volumes, and so on.

Dealing with tools like ecs-cli to create an AWS version of docker-compose files calls for another layer of complexity. This requires some time for reading documentation, getting familiar with tools, and finally using them on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, these tasks are not usable when dealing with certain cloud-computing services, such as Google Cloud platform.

Continuous Delivery

At Clearcode, we want to deliver final products as fast as we can.

To make this possible, we need tools that will help us perform some recurring tasks in an automated way.

This is where Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery solutions come in.

Due to our love for Docker, the choice was obvious: Drone platform.

We have been using Drone for a few months now, and even though it’s still under development, we’re satisfied with the results. We take advantage of features like isolated build steps within one workspace, secrets, step conditions, notifications, publishing images on different platforms, tons of plugins, and many more.

Our new pipeline with Drone has reduced build and deployment time dramatically.

Also, having a .drone.yml file within the project’s code is our preferred way.

Additionally, having as many Drone agents as we want has eliminated build ques caused by insufficient build slots.

Kubernetes

Having a platform-independent environment with a strong use of Docker gave us an idea to adopt Kubernetes as our default orchestration tool.

It seemed cumbersome and confusing at the beginning, but after a few days of working with Kubernetes, our developers got used to it — they even started to like it and began using it locally.

Below are some key elements of our orchestration process:

Zero downtime deployments

This may sound funny, but there were actually times when deploying applications without any interruptions was labelled as progress.

In 2018, the default development mode should be zero downtime, if it isn’t already. This means that every application we create must be deployed in this way.

Runs on local environment

Even the most complex application stacks must be run on a developer’s local machine without any code changes. Sometimes it involves running over 20 microservices communicating with each other.

Independent containers

Containers must be independent from each other with their own health checks. Kubernetes’ liveness and readiness health-checks are very handy to distinguish a recently started container from a working service.

Easy upgrades of applications

Kubernetes’ Rolling Update feature is a perfect tool for upgrading containers.

It makes no difference whether it’s just one container or many of them as it allows you to control the whole update process.

All you need to do is identify how many containers must be updated at once, how many seconds a healthy state takes to be recognized as a success, and so on.

Of course, there is a fast way to implement a rollback.

Sensitive data management

Almost every application has some sort of sensitive piece of data, for example, database credentials and tokens.

By contrast, every cloud provider has its own way of dealing with this data.

Unfortunately, these solutions are not interchangeable. For example, getting encrypted data from AWS S3 when starting the application doesn’t work on GCP (instance roles) and requires installing additional software (aws-cli).

Kubernetes’ secrets helps us to unify this approach, even on a local machine.

Service discovery

In a dynamic environment, when new containers start and old ones stop, there needs to be a way to inform other services that the old containers no longer exist.

That’s where Kubernetes’ services comes in.

Instead of “talking” to specific containers, which may have changed, applications communicate with the services, which allows them to expose one or many pods to other applications.

Scaling

Dynamic scaling is a must in today’s world.

We write our applications with this in mind from day one of the product’s life.

Sometimes, the product’s traffic reaches levels higher than the clients anticipated, especially at the beginning when it has just been released to initial users.

That’s why it’s vital for us to have this possibility from the beginning, instead of worrying about what to do when it’s too late. With Kubernetes scaling, every single service can be transformed to handle the new traffic volume.

Works on every developer’s system

We only use OSX and Linux machines, so it’s quite easy to handle Kubernetes on these two operating systems.

This is especially important as the new version of Docker for Mac comes with Kubernetes support. Imagine running Ingress load balancer on your local machine with just one command. Linux has its own minikube cluster.

Guidelines

Below we share a few guidelines which make our work with Kubernetes easy and allow us to avoid problems at every stage of the project’s life cycle.

We hope you find them useful.

Build Docker images as small as possible.
Use alpine-based images.
Make use of Docker’s multistage builds.
Minimize the number of layers.
Tag your images with an application version, git repo hash or even build number. DO NOT use “latest” tag.
Make use of resource limits.
Use Kubernetes labels. They are free.
Use the good old Makefile to automate regularly performed tasks.
Avoid installing unnecessary packages.
Use init containers.
Use liveness and readiness health checks.
Use namespaces.
Use .dockerignore files.
Use secrets, mount them in a read-only mode. Make sure you distribute them securely.
Avoid root user inside containers.
Log to stderr and stdout.
Use DaemonSets (fluentd).
Use secure and authorized images.
Limit access to Kubernetes cluster to authorised users only.
Use Resource Based Access Control.
Do not build sensitive data into containers. Use secrets instead.
Add Kubernetes manifests to your code repository.
Use a “deploy first” approach.
Log application metrics and send them to an appropriate place. We use InfluxDB.
Use Helm.
Expose only required services.
Use Ingress type for routing and path-based services
Use /healthz health check path when possible

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The Polish Startup Ecosystem and Future Of AdTech With Maciej Zawadzinski

Michal Wlosik — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 13:48:14 +0000

Listen to the recent episode of The Global Startup Movement where Andrew Berkowitz talks to Maciej Zawadziński about the beginnings of Clearcode, the company’s advertising background and how it has grown to become an international big player in the AdTech/MarTech market.

In the interview, Maciej explores an array of current MarTech- and AdTech-related questions like the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation and the meaning of data ownership.

Maciej also provides his insights into the software development landscape and startups in Poland, opportunities, talent sourcing challenges, as well as the imminent transition from software outsourcing services to products.

You can listen to the podcast here:
iTunes / Stitcher / Soundcloud

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