From 30 Seconds to 200ms: What a Slow Search Taught Us About Scale
When a guest search hit 13 million records, a hidden scaling problem became a 150x performance win.
From idea to app in hours: how Windsurf builds full-stack apps with you
I’ll be honest, with so many AI tools, editors, and chatbots launching every day, it can quickly get overwhelming. Sometimes, I just feel like sticking with Copilot and Claude and calling it a day.
Mews R&D MiniPodcast with Vladimír Pinďura
In this episode, Jan Meissner sits down with Vladimír Pinďura, Engineering Manager in Connectivity, to explore the challenges and rewards of leading a distributed team. Vladimír shares how he keeps his team engaged across distances, measures success beyond numbers, and fosters continuous learning through dedicated sessions. They discuss the impact of visiting customers in person […]
Mews R&D MiniPodcast with Magdalena Piątek
In this episode, our R&D Community Lead, Jan Meissner, talks with Magdalena Piątek, Senior Software Engineer at Mews, about her inspiring transition from frontend to backend — and how that shift led her to lead the development of our multicurrency feature in the fintech domain. Magda shares how curiosity, a supportive team, pair coding sessions, […]
The T-Shaped Engineer: Balancing Depth, Breadth, and Burnout
At the time, the term “T-shaped” was starting to become more common in product and engineering conversations. The idea? Someone with deep expertise in one area (say frontend), but with broad working knowledge across many (such as backend, product thinking, security, threat modeling, performance, deployment, etc.). In practice? It meant stepping into ambiguity, learning fast, and finding your own path through it.
Mews R&D MiniPodcast with Adi Tamches
In this episode, our R&D Community Lead, Jan Meissner, talks with Adi Tamches, Senior Product Designer at Mews, who focuses on crafting the guest experience — from check-in to check-out and beyond. Adi dives into what it means to design for B2C users in a predominantly B2B product, and how real guest feedback and close […]
Mews R&D MiniPodcast with Sylvia Tang
In this episode, our R&D Community Lead, Jan Meissner, chats with Sylvia Tang, Product Manager in the Connectivity team at Mews. Sylvia shares her journey—from studying at hotel school to starting in Mews customer support, all the way to her current role in product. With a deep passion for numbers and systems thinking, Sylvia found […]
Mews R&D MiniPodcast with Ondra Heřmánek
In this episode, our R&D Community Lead, Jan Meissner, sits down with Ondra Heřmánek, Staff Backend Engineer and true Mews veteran. Together, they explore Ondra’s fascinating career path — from hands-on backend engineering to leading teams as Head of Backend and Engineering Manager, and ultimately returning to his roots as a Staff Engineer. What drives […]
How Incident Responders Can Manage Mental Health in High-Stress Tech Environments
Incident responders are key to keeping software systems secure and functional. However, the nature of this work can be extremely stressful and demanding, so it’s essential to manage your mental health while handling the challenges of incident response.
Avoiding Workflow Gridlock: Lessons from a Kafka Outage
A Kafka outage caused thousands of our Temporal workflows to get stuck before doing any meaningful work. We shipped a fix to decouple core logic from Kafka by running steps in parallel—using the patching API and replay tests to keep things safe. We also learned a few hard lessons about versioning, workflow longevity, and staying focused on what really matters.
Mews R&D MiniPodcast with Václav Kučera
In this new episode, our R&D Community Lead, Jan Meissner, chats with Václav Kučera, our Staff Backend Engineer and passionate mechanical keyboard enthusiast. They dive deep into Václav’s love for custom keyboards, his role as a Czech mechanical keyboard meetup organizer, and why this niche hobby resonates so strongly with engineers. Get ready for clicky […]
Tool Evaluation Made Easy: Scoring Framework + Comparison Matrix
Building a new product comes with a series of decisions—and choosing the right tools is one of the most important.
Scaling GuestPortal: from monolithic backend to microservices
Discover how scaling GuestPortal from a monolithic backend to microservices unlocks greater scalability, domain independence, and operational efficiency.
How .NET Aspire is transforming Developer Experience at Mews
Last year, I shared my thoughts on the importance of Developer Experience (DX) in software development and how it directly affects productivity. Building on that discussion, we started working on a new platform called Mews Atlas—designed to help teams ship code faster while keeping everything secure and compliant. To kick things off, we introduced automated […]
How we got started with Temporal: Durable execution for payments automation
It’s been some time since we began thinking about using the durable execution framework called Temporal. Why? The reason is fairly simple: it helps us implement actual business cases while allowing us to worry less about how we reliably execute the code. But as with everything in life, nothing is black and white — rather, […]
From passwords to passkeys: Making authentication better
The Mews way of migrating from Monolith to Microservices, reimagining the entire application from the product POV.
Why we do incident drills and why you should too
The Mews way of migrating from Monolith to Microservices, reimagining the entire application from the product POV.
Guest Journey breaks free from monolith on a budget
The Mews way of migrating from Monolith to Microservices, reimagining the entire application from the product POV.
The benefits of shifting from technology-driven to product-driven development
Introduction I am a backend developer with 20 years of development experience, starting when .net 1.0 was released. But throughout the years, I have been working full stack one way or another. Back then, there was no difference between backend, frontend, or QA engineers. You were just a developer. You were expected to know and […]
Why guest journey and user disengagement matter in modern hospitality
Introduction Why is the tech and hospitality industry discussing the importance of the guest journey and user disengagement today? What it means and why are just a few of the things I will explore in this article. Then, I will take you on my journey in today’s hospitality world and look at some of the […]
Embracing remote work in tech: Employee benefits and tips
Introduction The advent of remote work in the technology sector, combined with the effects of COVID, has revolutionized the way we work and opened doors to a better quality of life for individuals living with chronic diseases such as psoriasis. In addition, the flexibility of remote work allows people to spend time in warmer climates […]
Distributed Systems, Docker, and Developer Experience
Discover how Docker enhances Developer Experience (DX) in developing distributed systems and why it has become a popular choice among developers.
Microservices: Synchronous communication with gRPC
Describing synchronous communication between microservices using gRPC, discussing highlights and challenges, and showing a simple example written in .NET 6.
MMA, MTG, CS:GO… Lukas’ life in abbreviations
Lukas, another developer, hailing from Matfyz. Why does he enjoy what he does at Mews? What is his most expensive MTG card? And what’s Angel’s Share?
Is Entity Framework Hurting Your Database Performance?
Learn how Entity Framework might be hurting your database performance and what to do about it.
Linqpad – the virtual scratchpad you never knew you wanted (until now)
A virtual scratchpad should be every dev’s best friend, and linqpad might be just the right tool for the job.
Understanding index fragmentation in SQL Server
Dealing with index fragmentation in databases has been a contentious topic in the SQL Server community. Here’s our take.
Increasing payment terminal performance with optimism
How we used data and optimism to increase the performance of our payment terminals by over 90% and nearly eliminated all waiting time.
Do you understand your own code?
At Mews, we’re all about writing code that’s easy to read, understand and consequently maintain. So, while we could probably write our open source libraries faster than we do, we take a little extra time to invest in our future. In this blog post I’ll share with you a couple of things that help us […]
C# Static Constructor Performance Mystery
We like functional programming a lot at Mews, and one of the most basic and mundane, yet extremely powerful concepts is Maybe monad. Maybe is called Option in FuncSharp, which is the functional programming embodiment of our choice for C#. Option and its Map method, which is basically a projection of an option’s value (if […]
C# code style by EditorConfig in .NET 5 SDK and beyond
In this article, I’ll help you understand how to ensure modern C# code style with .NET 5 SDK and EditorConfig. It will save you hours of reading documentation and GitHub issues. Basically, it’s an article I would have liked to read when I first started building our .editorconfig for .NET 5 in Mews. What is […]
Types First
Have you ever come across a piece of code wrapped in seemingly random validation conditions?
How has Mews made me a better developer (even before I joined)
“Well, this is interesting!” I silently uttered to myself as I was digging deeper into a topic that now, after the experience, I think anybody who’s serious about software development should learn. Yet, if it wasn’t for my interview at Mews, which incentivized me and inspired me to learn the topic, I probably wouldn’t learn […]
How we selected infrastructure as code tool that is the best fit for us
Why define infrastructure through code? There is a lot of chatter lately about infrastructure as code in the Cloud engineers/DevOps community, but one should not get hyped up about the latest technology/framework/library and invest time and resources into it right away. That could easily turn into a huge waste of time when you realize after […]
Declarative Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi
Infrastructure as code (IaC) has been a big project for us recently, and we clearly saw the benefits it would bring. These benefits include applying our existing review process to our infrastructure (not just to the application code); using languages, tools, and build chains that we already know; and allowing for scenarios that are difficult […]
Beaches, Beers, Archaeology, and Changing Careers at 30
If you’re living in Prague and you know an American, they most likely came over to teach English. However, not many of them stick with it for too long, and that’s the story for Tim. Surprisingly, after his short-lived English teaching career, Tim’s passion for archaeology got him interested in programming and computers in general. […]
Standa: fan of Bob Dylan, algorithmic randomness, and Calvin Coolidge
The 30th US president, Calvin Coolidge, was known to be a man of few words. Luckily, that wasn’t the case with Standa during our interview. We covered everything from the hard life of a PhD student and changing musical taste to a recently developed passion for road bikes. Standa gave us some tips about where […]
Are we migrating to microservices and should you?
“Should we migrate from monolith to microservices?” That’s the inevitable question most scaling companies ask these days, including Mews. Looking at the state of the art, one might rephrase Dan Ariely’s quote about Big Data to microservices. Microservices are like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks […]
Pair programming in the Payments team
A few months ago, we had a discussion about problems that members of the Payments team face. We identified knowledge sharing as the main problem: the Payments team takes care of payments, obviously, but that means communication with payment service providers, card tokenization, payment automation… And it’s not just a complex domain, but also an […]
Composition over inheritance: road to algebraic data types
How many times have you worked with inheritance hierarchy, which was almost impossible to change? Which made you feel like you are not the one in control, but just plugging bits and pieces into this big colossus? If you make living out of programming for some while, chances are you have experienced this more than […]
Learning is good: no matter if it’s management, piano or F#
I was really looking forward to interviewing Pepa one day. I had observed him for months, almost like David Attenborough observes emperor penguins mating in Antarctica. And, indeed, he is a unique species. Talking to him, you wouldn’t think that he was born after the Czech hockey team won the gold medal at the Nagano […]
FSharpPlus: Advanced FP concepts in F#
Many developers who discover F# as their first functional language are amazed by features such as algebraic data types or immutability by default. However, this is not the end of what FP has to offer, but mere beginning. In the talk I gave at F# Online Meetup, I presented more advanced concepts of functional programming […]
Amsterdam: the city of… .NET talks
The fear I hate flying. Even though it’s said to be the safest method of transportation, my fear of heights, fear of speed, and claustrophobia don’t really make it feel that way. And if something goes wrong, you’re doomed. Sooner or later, everybody found out about me and flying. Some were a bit surprised, especially […]
Functional programming in C#
On February 17 2020 I gave a talk at .NET / dotnet Amsterdam meetup. In this talk I slowly incorporated the main benefits of functional programming into C # with a much easier learning curve to functional concepts opposed to starting in purely functional languages as an OOP programmer. Check my slides, and read more […]
Classic cliché: computer nerds. If you thought they were extinct, think again….
For the first time in the short history of the Meet MewsDevs interview series, I decided it would be a good idea to interview two people at once. Alexander (frontend dev) and Vaclav (backend dev) have a lot in common. They both study at Charles University Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (Matfyz), live in the […]
Automated zero-downtime migrations
Mews is used by hotels all over the world in various time zones leaving us with no room for maintenance downtime. This fact and our aim for continuous deployment left us no other choice than zero downtime deployments, as having even short outages is obviously not an option. However, these non-breaking migrations are executed manually […]
Meet the MewsDevs – Jarda
Over the years working closely with our development team I’ve realized that I am surrounded by people with such random and extraordinary natures that it would be a shame if we didn’t tell the world about them. You are reading the first piece of what we envision as a series of Meet the MewsDevs interviews. […]
Direct printing in a cloud application
Having a cloud solution is really cool, you can access the system anywhere and from any device – notebook, mobile or tablet. There are other advantages, like working remotely without boring settings and using a VPN to access your company network. Everything seems to be going great until you need to access local devices from […]
Continuous delivery of release notes
In Mews, on our journey towards continuous product delivery, we faced an unanticipated, but really important issue for our customers; promptly informing them about updates and new features of the system, also known as “release notes”. Solving this became a precondition for us going full steam ahead with continuous delivery. With a few deployments a […]
Zero downtime deployments with EntityFramework
Mews is used by hotels all over the world in various time zones leaving us with no room for maintenance downtime. This fact, and our aim for continuous deployment left us no other choice than zero downtime deployments, as having even short outages is obviously not an option. Our application uses Entity Framework with code […]