An incident report for the Canva outage on November 12, 2024.

Brendan Humphreys

Canva incident report: API Gateway outage

How Canva uses graph traversal to handle the complexity of getting print orders to our customers.

Constantinos Kavadias

Carmen Wang

Callum Grier

The science of routing print orders

How we improved Canva’s private design search while respecting the privacy of our community.

Ellese Cotterill

How to improve search without looking at queries or results

How I learned to stop worrying and love metadata.

Rob Scriva

Our journey to Snowflake monitoring mastery

How we use the CSS cascade to enable building responsive layouts

Jordan Cohn

Adding responsiveness to Canva’s Design System

Our journey to implement and support real-time mouse pointers.

Anton Egorov

Mark Gurevich

Real-time mouse pointers

How we improved our continuous integration build times from hours to less than 30 minutes.

Marco Lacava

Arpit Sharma

Faster continuous integration builds at Canva

The architecture of our product analytics event delivery pipeline.

Long Nguyen

How Canva collects 25 billion events per day

Experimentation and experiment analysis are vital procedures at Canva to safeguard the customer experience.

Vincey Au

How we build experiments in-house

How we understand and detect groups in user designs

Xin Liang

How we see groups in design

How we do endpoint vulnerability management at Canva.

Santiago Gutiérrez

Endpoint vulnerability management at scale

How we built a scalable and reliable content usage counting service.

Sangzhuoyang Yu

Scaling to Count Billions

Some of the engineering challenges we encountered while developing our vector drawing tool

Alex Gemberg

Behind the draw - How Canva's drawing tool works

How we validate vendor security at Canva by going beyond compliance.

Kane Narraway

CJ Fairhead

Trust but test: Vendor security testing at Canva

CVEs in three strange places and the unique problem of safely processing and handling fonts.

Angus Cornall

Peter Kydas

Fonts are still a Helvetica of a Problem

How we use GPT-4 to summarize incident reports.

Wuji Zhu

Summarizing Post Incident Reviews with GPT-4

How Canva does hand-drawn shape recognition in the browser

Kerry Halupka

Rowan Katekar

Ship Shape

How we killed SQL and built a machine learning model in its place

Ben Alexander

Paul Tune

End-to-end Keyword Bidding for Apple Search Ads

Discovery and walkthrough of CVE-2023-38633 in librsvg, when two URL parser implementations (Rust and Glib) disagree on file scheme parsing leading to path traversal.

Zac Sims

When URL parsers disagree (CVE-2023-38633)

Our journey to empower developers to build flexible apps with a simple powerful app platform.

Martin Cronjé

How we built the Canva Apps SDK

How we reliably migrated hundreds of GBs of relational DB data for our service split project

Dafu Ai

Relational Database Migration with AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

How Canva implemented end-to-end tracing and are using it to drive operational insights

Ian Slesser

End-to-end Tracing

Understanding our data and usage patterns was the real key.

Josh Smith

How Canva saves millions annually in Amazon S3 costs

For those who want to understand what color spaces are, find out how to transform videos from one color space into another one, or read about how I almost went crazy trying to find out why videos generated with Canva look slightly off in terms of color.

Sven Schindler

A journey through color space with FFmpeg

Discovery of Headless Chromium security vulnerability, how it works, and mitigations that should be applied to similar configurations

Rhys Elsmore

Discovering Headroll (CVE-2023–0704) in Chromium

How we developed a bespoke frequency-recency segmentation to understand our users' diverse usage patterns.

Cuong Duong

Naomi Stuart

Understanding a Diverse User Base with Frequency Segmentation at Scale

How we used a CLIP-inspired model to suggest keywords for template labeling in multiple languages.

Sachinthaka Abeywardana

Deep Learning for Infinite (Multi-Lingual) Keywords

The evolution of media persistence during hypergrowth at Canva

Jacky Chen

Robert Sharp

From Zero to 50 Million Uploads per Day: Scaling Media at Canva

More on how we are rebuilding Canva's search stack and pipeline.

Stuart Cam

Search Pipeline: Part II

How we are rebuilding Canva's search stack and pipeline.

Search Pipeline: Part I

How we built our first iteration of content matching at Canva.

Christopher Bong

Simple, Fast, and Scalable Reverse Image Search Using Perceptual Hashes and DynamoDB

From firefighting chaos to problem solving zen.

Zi Yang Pang

How We Used Data to Optimize Our Quality Assistance Model

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble — well, sometimes it is.

Jonathon Belotti

Supporting GPU-accelerated Machine Learning with Kubernetes and Nix

Scaling pre-development, rollout, and post-production SEO testing at Canva.

Siddharth Salunke

Testing Search Engine Optimization Scalably without Breaking a Sweat

Using a monorepo causes a lot of performance challenges for git. Here's how we solve them at Canva.

Anh Le

We Put Half a Million files in One git Repository, Here's What We Learned

How the data analytics platform team scaled data ingestion from various services at Canva.

Jaskirat Grover

Justin Ty

Service-aligned Data Platform Architecture

Using CSS grid to render complex webpages responsively.

Benjamin Morris

CSS: Absolutely positioning things relatively

How we position Infrastructure Engineering as a value-add.

Ryan Armstrong

Infrastructure is Distribution

Lessons learned from migrating 1000+ browser-functional tests from Chimp, WebdriverIO, and Saucelabs to CodeceptJS and Playwright.

Benjamin Sejas

Srini Ramasamy

Speeding up UI tests with CodeceptJS and Playwright

Our migration journey and key lessons from this journey.

James Gover

Migrating from Solr to Elasticsearch, and their differences

Xidorn Quan

Picking Color via Eyedropper on Web App

How we use machine learning to estimate depth and salience maps for photos in Canva.

Going Deeper with Depth Maps

Applying classic principles from physics and optics to build the best possible camera effects at Canva.

Bhautik Joshi

Combining Classic and Modern: A New Approach to Camera Simulation

How we deal with potential problems when running Canva's recommendation system.

Mayur Panchal

Thien Bui

Recommender systems: When they fail, who are you gonna call?

The technology that powers Continuous Localization at Canva.

Minh Cung

Simon Hammond

How to design in every language at once

How the hyperparameters of our machine learning models are tuned at Canva.

Ryan Lin

Yiran Jing

Machine learning hyperparameter optimization with Argo

Evolving Canva's subscription data architecture to enable data-driven decision making.

Chuxin Huang

Grant Noble

Subscription analytics at scale

This post describes how we empowered our users at Canva to collaborate by introducing services that support streaming using RSocket.

Sergey Tselovalnikov

Michael Belton

Enabling real-time collaboration with RSocket

Behind the scenes on our mission to drive the next era of presentation software.

Ashwanth Fernando

Lessons learnt from building reactive microservices for Canva Live

This post explains how we built a data-driven system that can perform autocorrection at scale across languages.

Building a Data-Driven Autocorrection System

How we use visual regression testing to instill confidence in every product update.

Joscha Feth

Why we left manual UI testing behind

Our choice of programming language has the ability to change the way we view a problem and how we interact with it.

Josh Leeb-du Toit

Why we'll always be exploring new programming languages at Canva

Canva's first Head of Engineering shares lessons learned from Google and Lyft to scale our engineering culture at Canva.

Joel Hynoski

Scaling engineering at Canva

This article introduces alpha blending and some tips relating to the alpha channel in WebGL development.

David Guan

Alpha Blending and WebGL

In the end, embeds are about making content on the web even more connected and shareable, which is what the web is all about.

Paul Knittel

How Canva makes content embeddable (and why you should too)

This article details five visual effects found in the Canva web application that exist to help achieve these goals of simplicity and fun.

Chris Doble

5 visual effects Canva uses to thrill users

Developing the Compute Service, aimed at the increasing processing burden of password hashing and the signing of private CDN URLs.

Sam Killin

Canva's compute backend

This post is our attempt to describe the practices we've found help us work more efficiently as a team.

David Hearnden

How we get things done

During periods of heavy use, we needed a mechanism to ask the browser and mobile apps to back off and reduce the frequency of auto-saves.

Knowing when to back off

How we've built a Standard Development Environment (SDE).

Josh Graham

Standardizing the development environment

Maintaining a functionally complete yet airtight local development environment is something we consider to be of critical importance.

Canva Engineering Blog