If there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s the importance of hospital resources.
Unfortunately, many hospitals have outdated infrastructure for modern-day operations. This can lead to problems with equipment, safety, security and more.
That’s where Cox Prosight comes in.
Prosight is a real-time location system that helps hospitals monitor assets, environments and people across a facility. From tracking the status of hospital equipment to helping patients navigate through a facility to supporting staff safety, Prosight helps streamline healthcare operations.
Prosight, a Cox Communications innovation, is a full stack solution including software, hardware and services from a single provider. It’s designed to help hospitals improve operational efficiency, staff safety, clinical workflows and patient engagement.
Jai Balasubramanian is Director of Strategy and Product Management at Cox Communications and is a leader in innovating smart hospital solutions. Jai shared some insight about the technology behind Prosight and why this product is important.
Certainly. My team’s mission is to unleash the true potential of a connected hospital by enabling complete asset tracking and monitoring solutions, giving hospitals the data and tools they need to improve processes, realize operational efficiencies and deliver better experiences to staff and patients. This new IoT business line venture was established in 2021.
Every role in our team is pretty hands-on and directly contributes to the development of cutting-edge cloud- connected IoT applications and offerings with the latest tools. Our teams have a degree of collaboration among highly talented, cross-functional and geographically dispersed locations.
We are looking for talented and creative problem solvers who would like to be involved in the complete software development life cycle, seeing your hard work transform into a finished product in an agile environment. You’d be working with a dynamic team of professional intrapreneurs who are passionate about solving customer needs using disruptive technologies.
It’s safe to say that most people don’t find car shopping to be a pleasant experience.
From spending hours in a dealership to fretting about payment terms to completing piles of paperwork, most of us have experienced the nail-biting process that leads to finally being able to get behind the wheel of a new ride.
On the other side of the desk, dealers run into plenty of frustrations as well, trying to ensure a great experience for shoppers and move inventory off their lots, while still staying profitable.
Imagine being able to transform this process forever, impacting both how dealerships operate and how people find their dream cars. Tech employees at Cox Automotive have that opportunity by working on products like Esntial Commerce, an artificial intelligence retail technology that helps provide shoppers with an automated, 100% online financing process.
Esntial helps optimize the sales process, estimating payment in such a way that is appealing to both shopper and seller. It offers payment personalization based on the shopper’s risk profile, selected vehicle and preferred deal structure using an AI/machine learning algorithm. It offers actual financing and the ability to immediately transact online, meaning that customers can move forward confidently knowing that their financing has been approved.
Pretty cool, right? We wanted to know more about Esntial and what opportunities are available in this space, so we sat down with Isaac Hogue, Associate Vice President of Software Engineering at Cox Automotive, to get the inside scoop.
Sure. First of all, Esntial is a web-based platform that’s fully AWS on a serverless stack, so it’s the best of the best in terms of what an engineer would want to be working on. It’s also a really meaningful product in the marketplace, transforming how dealerships operate with a consumer-centric focus. It’s a win-win that hasn’t historically existed in the industry.
We’re using machine learning to assess the marketplace and find opportunities to present to consumers and dealers when a car is being transacted. This product sits squarely in the machine learning space so if you’re interested in data science and modeling out different algorithms for machine learning, you’ll love what we’re doing here.
We have about 250 people working on this right now, and 26 scrum teams. We’ve got a very diverse group of tech professionals, with people from all over the world.
We’re primarily looking for web developers, web engineers, user experience experts, product owners, data engineers and DevOps engineers.
It’s out in the market with a progressive release. The initial launch was last July and we’re ramping up to different clients this year. We’re primarily focused on the used car market, but in the future we’ll be turning our attention to new and certified pre-owned vehicles as well. We’re also working on building self-healing capabilities, asking ourselves how we can build reliability and resiliency into the product itself.
I love that we’re working on something that makes a difference; not things that are just going to find their way onto a shelf somewhere. This is a place where you get to redefine the entire automotive industry.
If you ask Belinda Loi – Manager of Network Automation at Cox Communications – to describe her team in one sentence, she’ll probably say something like this:
“We are building the next generation of network engineers with a focus on automation-first design.”
Born in Norway and based in Atlanta, Belinda said that her friends and coworkers alike would describe her as “a hype woman” – someone who loves bringing out the best in everyone, empowering others and collaborating for success.
“Our focus is not to build big applications, but rather services that support business processes,” she said. “It’s less about the applications or products, and more about training and growing our people to apply the open-source products that are already available.”
Belinda and team have the unique challenge and privilege of having multiple tech stacks beneath their umbrella. One specific one that comes to mind is Red Hat’s Ansible platform – which Belinda says is a flexible solution for helping network engineers “crowdsource” automation.
“With thousands of modules prebuild and curated into Ansible Galaxy Collections, you can create automation that turns up a VM, sends emails or reports, communicates with REST services, modifies ACL’s on network devices, deploys Docker containers, manages Kubernetes clusters or performs a backup of the configuration on your network devices…the possibilities really are endless.”
What does the word “innovation” mean to Belinda?
“Innovation is often born out of necessity, starting with an idea and fueled by passion,” she explained. “To supplement and foster innovation, the Network Automation team is working to equip our engineers with ways to leverage the latest technology stack to continue challenging the status quo and making things more efficient and reliable.”
One example of how Belinda’s team makes tech more efficient and reliable is a project that took place in 2021. Belinda’s team was asked to provide automation in support of NIST-800 compliance efforts that the Cox Business Engineering and Security teams were focused on delivering.
“This work would require some very complex cleanup and validation of our prefix-lists on the Cox Business Nokia fiber network, as the inventory is a staggering 45,000 devices strong and growing,” Belinda said. “That’s combined with some of the most cutting-edge and emerging software design patterns, GitOps, Network ‘as code’ and closed loop automation style principals as the core of the design.”
Partnering with other network engineers at Cox, Belinda and team set off to deliver an Ansible playbook that could maintain one source of truth about IP prefix-lists for this network, house those “golden configs” in Git and then calculate the remediation plan on a per host basis – executing and ensuring ongoing compliance in a unified way.
At the end of the project, the team deployed configurations to the entire Nokia Core (approximately 750 hosts) in all six regions of the enterprise on several separate occasions in 2021, causing zero service-affecting or zero-impacting outages. The project was even used as a source of demonstration for Pair Programming at Red Hat’s AnsibleFest 2021 Developer Conference.
“These kinds of opportunities and challenges are my favorite thing about working at Cox,” Belinda siad. “I like that I’m able to voice my opinion on projects and my leaders are very supportive of things I want to try.”
Belinda worked in the telecom industry before beginning her career at Cox and understands the importance of good workplace culture. Referring to the telecom company she worked for previously, Belinda said: “I was really invested in the company but didn’t feel like they were invested in me.”
When a recruiter reached out regarding an open position at Cox, Belinda was intrigued by the opportunity.
“Cox cares about their people,” she said. “It’s something we pride ourselves on and I was struck by that from the very beginning.”
Belinda feels that she’s contributed to meaningful tech transformation during her four years at Cox.
“At Cox, I feel like I’ve made an impact and that I’m valued,” she said. “There’s a path for my career here.”
Valentyna Yurtyn is always up for a challenge.
She’s an active person who can often be found hiking, biking, going to CrossFit and swimming in the Pacific Ocean – and the promise of adventure was the very thing that attracted her to a career in technology.
“What brought me to software engineering is the challenge,” said Valentyna, Principal Software Engineer at Cox Automotive. “I enjoy the changing environment.”
If you’ve ever shopped for a car online, chances are you’ve interacted with Valentyna’s work. Her group develops and maintains high-traffic websites for Cox Automotive brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book.
“Cox is ahead of the curve for things like native ads,” Valentyna said. “Sometimes I hear about companies doing things and I think ‘Oh, we’ve been using that technology for a while now; we integrated it a long time ago.’ We’re using a breakthrough approach. Our tech stack is wide and we have lots of different projects.”
Elaborating on the tech stack, Valentyna shared that her team builds micro-frontends with JavaScript ReactJS. For backend development, they build services using NodeJS, Microsoft ASP.NET Core and Java. All infrastructure uses cloud-based architecture with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
One of the most impactful projects for Valentyna’s team is working on web performance optimizations.
“Web performance has been at the top of the list in discussions within web developers’ communities,” Valentyna said. “Our company leadership made a commitment to focus on user-centric performance, and engineering teams work in coordination with ad sales, operations and product teams to identify performance opportunities.”
Valentyna’s team looks at different aspects of web performance and have been able to significantly improve user experience and performance metrics. They’ve driven server-side optimizations that improve response time and improve data query speed. They’ve driven content delivery network (CDN) updates for fast protocol, compression and image optimizations. They’ve driven UX and accessibility updates, like optimization of JavaScript bundles and improving cumulative layout shift (you can learn more about that project on our blog), as well as optimizations for analytics scripts and other third-party libraries.
“As I work on projects as a software engineer, I can see connections from start to finish and the results of the project,” Valentyna said.
Valentyna didn’t originally plan for a career in information technology. Her background is in business, and she slowly merged into a tech career when she realized she enjoyed its pace and potential.
“My degree in business actually helped me quite a bit,” she said. “It’s beneficial to have an understanding of business and good coordination with product teams.”
Software engineering teams at Cox are knee-deep in collaboration, often working in cross-functional discovery groups with colleagues in UX, analytics, research and more. Valentyna said that’s why she loves hackathons – a fast-paced event where different teams join forces on a project.
“It’s new and exciting to work with the team in quick sprints,” Valentyna said. “Not all ideas lead to successful implementation but executing on ideas and running user testing allows us to stay current with ever-changing environments.”
These are particularly challenging times for Valentyna, who is from Ukraine. While she has lived in the US since 2001, she has many friends and extended family who still reside in her home country.
“It’s been really scary and painful to watch,” Valentyna said. “It’s been hard to concentrate on anything else.”
Valentyna stressed the importance of staying informed about the current situation in Ukraine, contacting elected officials, keeping perspective on the impact of economic sanctions on Russia and making donations (the James M. Cox Foundation is leading by example by giving $500,000 to the American Red Cross to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian refugees).
“My biggest fear is that people around the world will get used to the war in Ukraine and move on with their lives,” Valentyna said. “Russia must be stopped. The war must be stopped.”
During a time filled with upheaval, Valentyna’s commitment to creating a meaningful impact stays the same, both at work and outside of it.
“To me, that’s what innovation means: responding to new environments and initiating change.”
There’s a stereotype about technology being an introverted profession.
As an artistic thinker and a self-professed social butterfly, Afsheen Mozammel is quick to negate any misconceptions about tech being an isolating field of work. It’s not uncommon to find her serving as a mentor, acting as a mentee or simply building relationships with peers and leaders.
“I like to connect with people,” Afsheen said. “That’s my thing. I’m very social.”
Connections are particularly important for Afsheen’s role as Manager of Engineering Enablement at Cox Communications – a fully remote role that is part of Cox’s Business Process Optimizations team. Afsheen’s group supports workflows of different technologies (including WATTS, OPTIX, EPS, JIRA, iGrafx and Visio) to ensure efficiency and visibility for Cox’s Field Engineer & Operations teams. In other words, Afsheen and her team use a data-driven approach to connect the dots between how a team operates and the impact it has.
“My team is always trying to find a way to get things done in a better and efficient manner without reinventing the wheel,” Afsheen said.
For example, one initative is an end-to-end engineering capability roadmap, where Afsheen’s team is exploring how to give Cox’s executive leaders a single source of truth for status, progress and collaboration opportunities among different engineering departments to minimize duplicate efforts and maximize efficiency.
Another example is a “proestimation” for time study. Afsheen and team used a data-driven approach to prioritize work based on business impact analysis, improving efficiency by 53%.
Afsheen, who was born in Dubai and raised in Bangladesh, pursued a tech career after getting her undergrad degree in business. After getting her master’s in industrial engineering, she worked for several different companies and often experienced a cutthroat, male-dominated and predominantly white environment.
“I was used to being the only woman in the room, let alone the only person of color in the room,” Afsheen said. “But if you asked me how I felt, I would say that I always felt like I was special. Because there was something about me that got me in that room.”
Afsheen began to crave a warmer atmosphere – literally. After 13 or 14 years of Midwest winters, she began to turn her attention toward a milder climate. Atlanta struck her as a good option, especially since her sister already lived there. Afsheen said that Cox – a values-driven tech company – appealed to her.
Afsheen was hired as an engineering manager at Cox and began to build a diverse team of tech experts. Having experienced a lack of diversity and inclusion at previous companies, Afsheen has made it a personal mission to be a champion for inclusion at Cox, getting involved with various inclusion efforts and serving as part of Cox’s ID&E ambassador program.
Afsheen’s life goal is “to impact people’s life in a positive way.”
“That’s my life’s work; my vision is to impact people whether I’m there or not,” Afsheen said. “Everything I do is a subset of that.”
Whether she’s leading her team on a new project, serving as a mentor for a fellow Cox employee or participating in inclusion efforts, Afsheen is encouraged to know that Cox’s vision is so well aligned with her own.
“[Working at Cox] is one of the best career moves I’ve ever made,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve worked with so many women in technology and the people here are so friendly. It feels like home.”
At Cox Automotive, we have successfully moved Oracle EBS to the Cloud! That sounds impressive. But who really cares and what does that even mean?
Well, let’s start with the basics. Oracle EBS, or E-Business Suite, is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that we use extensively across all of the Cox divisions to manage our finances, accounting and customer billing.
If you’re an aspiring technology professional, this may be the part where you yawn and glance toward your accounting major friends. But while finance functions may not sound exciting, they are critical to most every business. And at Manheim, where our auctions broker the sale of over 4 million vehicles every year, the technology to support these functions becomes strategic. When you account for the price of the vehicles, the purchased services, transportation, etc., we invoice for over $100 billion every year.
To make this even more interesting from a technology perspective, the dealer is often physically present at the auction site, with check in hand, waiting to pay for their car so they can drive it back to their lot immediately. This means our billing systems must integrate with our auction systems, title management and dealer financing systems all in real-time. Unlike typical billing processes which batch up their processing and send invoices overnight, our financial systems must be responsive and reliable throughout the day in order to meet the critical demands of our customers.
As our infrastructure has aged and the need for an upgrade has arisen, we made the decision to migrate our Oracle finance, billing and business intelligence applications to the cloud for all the standard reasons (e.g., cost, flexibility, speed, etc.). However, while most companies migrate their ERP applications to the cloud via a pure “lift and shift,” we took a much more strategic outlook. This means that instead of simply replicating the existing infrastructure components with cloud-based counterparts and re-installing the packaged application, we refreshed and automated our entire infrastructure approach.
By leveraging the experience that we had gained from moving some of our custom applications to the cloud (e.g., Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book) we completely reinvented our ERP infrastructure team and adopted an infrastructure-as-code mentality. And just like that, our stodgy old ERPs joined the ranks of the hip, modern technologies generally associated with web applications. Instead of tweaking an infrastructure configuration any time we implemented a fix, installed a patch or added capacity, we modified our infrastructure code. Now we leverage modern tools like Ansible, Jenkins and FlexDeploy to make every software and hardware change an automated and easily repeatable process. When one of our many environments needs to be updated, we simply shut it down and recreate a new, updated version with the push of a button. When our applications are under heavy loads during the day, our scripts automatically increase computing power and I/O speed, and then reduce levels when demand drops.
The ability to rapidly recreate our hardware and software configurations provides a whole new level of resiliency and redundancy that hadn’t existed with our traditional infrastructure. Instead of spending weeks purchasing a new server or additional disk space while manually planning for additional demand, we can react almost immediately as our needs arise. This allows us to instantly meet business demand without significantly overpaying for unused contingency.
As our expertise continues to mature, we are taking advantage of more and more cloud features. Our disaster-recovery approach now relies on virtual compute power, which only needs to be spun up in the event of a disaster. In the near future, we will achieve a state where we hot swap between cloud regions during every bi-weekly release, further reducing risk by decreasing deployment time, simplifying release rollbacks and exercising our disaster-recovery capability every two weeks instead of once a year.
In other words, while most companies are driving their ERPs around in the equivalent of a wood-paneled station wagon, we are cruising ours in a self-driving sports car.
The high traffic consumer-facing sites, KBB.com and Autotrader.com, run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
To give the best user experience for our visitors, our engineering teams strive for high availability and responsiveness of both websites. To prevent server overload, we distribute traffic using a load balancer. Initially, our apps were setup to use Classic Load Balancer (CLB). After reviewing some of the many advantages of an Application Load Balancer (ALB), including Layer 7 of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model, health monitoring, security features, and setting target groups, we chose to switch our apps to use Application Load Balancer. Below is the comparison of AWS Classic vs Application load balancer.
Load balancing distributes incoming application traffic across multiple available servers. This helps to improve application responsiveness and prevents server overload. A load balancer checks the health of the servers and sends traffic to the servers that can handle the requests to ensure scalability and availability of services.
Classic Load Balancer provides basic load balancing across multiple Amazon Elastic Computing (EC2) instances and operates at both the request level and connection level. Classic Load Balancer is recommended only for EC2 Classic instances. Layer 4 or Layer 7 Load Balancing of OSI, SSL Offloading and IPv6 Support are features of Classic Load Balancer. It does not support host and path-based routing.
Application Load Balancer allows a developer to configure and route incoming end-user traffic to applications based in the AWS public cloud. It operates at the seventh layer of the (OSI) model. At Layer 7, the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) can inspect application-level content, not just network packets. This allows the load balancer to route traffic based on more complex rules such as the path of the request to targets.
Comparing the benefits of AWS Application load balancer vs Classic load balancer, ALB is preferred if you need more complex load balancing and CLB can be used when using EC2 classic instances only.
To hear more about what else our engineering teams have been up to, stay tuned for future blog posts!
Security is always a top priority for the Cox Automotive product portfolio. Our VP of Engineering, Roger Vidal, reminds us during every all-hands meeting that our commitment to stability and security builds strong relationships with our customers today and builds trust in our brand for the future.
A little more than a year ago, we formed the IMS Security Guild – a volunteer group of engineers and practitioners from across the organization who champion the “security-aware mindset.” Our goal is to create a culture of security, and we identified some core values that Cox Automotive emphasizes with every product release:
Keeping in mind our mission and core values, the IMS Security Guild has promoted various training opportunities and security-focused activities during 2021.
Cox Automotive has been using AWS as our preferred cloud provider for a number of years, and we’re actively migrating major legacy systems to the cloud. Our software engineers have become intimately familiar with AWS and related technologies, and our executives have actively encouraged us to become AWS certified.
This year, the IMS Security Guild wanted an outside-the-box idea to encourage our engineering teams to level-up their security skills in a meaningful and applicable way. We decided to create a self-paced study group for the AWS Security Specialty exam, with the goal of having at least 5 people achieving certification by the end of the year.
Cox Automotive is a broad company that encompasses many tech teams; we have physical offices various time zones, not to mention dozens of folks who work remotely full time. So it was no surprise that running a study group resulted in some challenges. Simply finding a time on the calendar was a challenge in itself!
Another challenge we faced was the fact that not every software engineer or practitioner at Cox uses all of the parts of AWS covered by the exam. Every person in our study group came into things with a different level of AWS experience. We used video content available in Pluralsight to drive our study group, but not every developer was familiar with EC2 or Lambda or KMS.
Additionally, Cox Automotive abstracts certain features of AWS (namely IAM) away from our day-to-day product engineering, so some of our hands-on experience building software in AWS doesn’t perfectly align with the course content and the certification exam.
If you are going to consider studying for the AWS Security Specialty exam, here are some resources we would recommend based on our experience.
Our study group originally started by following the AWS Cloud Security “skill path” in Pluralsight, which is a collection of shorter courses by various content creators. We also watched Architecting for Security on AWS by Ben Piper. Generally speaking, those two Pluralsight resources were great. They gave us a wonderful baseline for security across AWS, though in hindsight they were not deep enough in several areas to prepare us for the certification exam.
We supplemented our study group with some popular YouTube videos, including a number of presentations from AWS re:Invent and other industry events:
We also discovered a fantastic blog post from Capital One which highlights a number of other resources. We specifically took closer looks at the AWS documentation and whitepapers for KMS. Last but not least, we highly recommend the WhizLabs practice tests, which really prepared us for the final exam!
If you’re interested in AWS Security, you might consider searching for open positions here at Cox Automotive! The organization is always encouraging us to learn, grow and contribute in innovative ways — they’ll even pay for you to get your AWS certifications!
Interested in exploring technology jobs at Cox? See open positions here.
Learn more about Cox Automotive here.
Our engineering teams develop and maintain several high-traffic consumer web sites, such as KBB.com and Autotrader.com. We aim to combine frictionless user experience with quality, trustworthy content to meet our vision of transforming the way the world buys, sells, owns and uses cars.
Web performance analysis helps us understand how visitors perceive our site performance and measure impact of updates to user experience. Over the last year, our engineering team has worked on various aspects of web performance. Keep reading to learn about the changes we have implemented to reduce Cumulative Layout Shift for KBB.com home page.
According to this Google Developers Article, “Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is an important, user-centric metric for measuring visual stability…” The metric flags shifting of content that happen without user interaction and as such is considered unexpected by visitors browsing the site.
In the screenshot below, you can see how even a small 50px shift of the element marked with the blue border moves the element marked with the red border down, below its initial placement. As we have all experienced, it is frustrating to accidentally tap on the wrong place or lose focus when the text you started reading unexpectedly shifts. Optimizing CLS score helps avoiding such situations.
To guide us with suggestions on performance improvements, our engineering team utilizes Lighthouse. This open-source automated tool audits page performance and can be run against any web page in Chrome browser DevTools, as well as from command line, or as a Node module. Cumulative Layout Shift is one of six performance metrics tracked by Lighthouse. While the CLS metric accounted for only 5% of the Performance Score in previous versions of Lighthouse, current version 8 updated its weighting to 15%, as can be seen in the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator. Additionally, in 2021 Cumulative Layout Shift metric was included in Google page experience signals as part of Core Web Vitals. Because of the increased emphasis on CLS in Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals, we chose to focus on this metric as a part of our overall performance effort.
The CLS metric is most successful when approaching zero. The lower the CLS score, the less unexpected shifting our visitors see when browsing a page. Thus, our goal was to get the CLS score as close as possible to zero for the most pleasant user experience. As the first step, we decided to optimize Cumulative Layout Shift for the initial (first) viewport – the visible area of the web page and page elements as they come into view and before visitors start interacting with the page. We defined 4 primary areas of improvement: optimizing fonts, server-side rendering styles, adding stability to visual elements on the page and optimizing advertisement modules.
Layout shift related to fonts is usually caused by a slight delay in displaying text with custom fonts (so called “Flash of Unstyled Text”). To display page content as soon as possible, browsers display text with default fonts while downloading custom fonts. When custom fonts become available, browsers apply them to text. The difference in width between default and custom fonts can be significant, causing re-adjustment of text sections of the page.
The screenshot below illustrates how applying custom font to the “Shop Smart – Step by Step” heading causes the text to wrap onto the next line, and shifts the module marked with the blue border below its initial placement:
To address Flash of Unstyled Text, we tested out multiple configuration settings for web fonts and decided on the following setup:
Even though layout shift with this setup is still possible, these changes minimized layout shift related to fonts.
Layout shift related to styles is usually caused by a slight delay in loading and applying styles (so called “Flash of Unstyled Content”).To avoid a performance impact from downloading external CSS stylesheets, we render styles on the server with the help of Emotion library. With this approach, browsers receive page HTML document with all styling embedded and can efficiently parse and display HTML content.
Some of the layout shifts for visual elements can happen when server-rendered HTML elements such as img or iframe lack dimensions. Initially rendering such elements with width and height of zero, browsers adjust their dimensions when loading is complete. We were able to improve user experience and prevent such layout shifts by implementing styling rules and adding width/height or aspect ratios to all the images, frames, or their parent containers.
Another potential culprit of increased layout shift and worse user experience is client-side processing. We use React library, and all content rendered on the server goes through additional processing in the browser (client-side); all events are attached, and additional content or data is loaded after network requests. It is important to minimize pushing the content down or collapsing elements during such client-side processing.
We evaluated all modules visible in the first viewport that load in part or entirely on the client and implemented a set of rules to improve CLS and user experience:
An example of a big win with decreasing our CLS score associated with client-side processing was a change we made to an expander component. The expander used to render about 200px of text first, only to collapse this text to 50px of height a second later. By rendering the expander component in collapsed state on the server, we fixed subpar performance of the expander component, lowered our CLS score and ensured our page visitors had a better experience!
Advertisement content deserves its own section in this blog post, as ad content can be one of the largest contributors to layout shifts. With most ad rendering happening on the client, and ad publishers sharing some of the prominent and highly visible page placements, maintaining satisfactory user experience is particularly important.
Kelley Blue Book uses Google Ads/Google Publisher Tags (GPT) to serve advertisement content. Even though ad slots may be rendered server-side, ad fulfillment always happens on the client. When advertisement creative is displayed within an iframe it is excluded from CLS metric measurements, however advertisement containers themselves are always included in the metric and should be optimized. This article from Google suggests some ideas of how to minimize layout shift from advertisement.
In collaboration with ad sales, operations, and product teams we implemented several important updates to lower layout shift related to advertisement:
Looking at the end-result of our efforts, you can tell that the homepage now maintains good visual stability of HTML elements:
We validated all changes by running Lighthouse tool and tracking improvements of Cumulative Layout Score value (part of Lighthouse Performance Score). After working through all optimizations not only we achieved the best possible CLS score of zero, but also established a set of best practices to maintain this perfect CLS score in the future.
Filmstrip in the Lighthouse report below shows how visually stable KBB.com homepage is after all our updates:
We should consider that CLS metric in Google Lighthouse measures only layout shift within the first viewport and does not emulate user scrolling down the page or interacting with page elements. However, as part of the Core Web Vitals, CLS metric is “…measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience.”
I plan on covering Core Web Vitals CLS optimizations in my next blog post, so stay tuned to learn more about the inner workings of Kelley Blue Book Engineering team!
Learn how Cox Automotive technology teams are building a more connected and mobile future here.
Are you interested in joining our engineering team? Explore open positions here.
What exactly is Cox2M? It’s Cox Communications’ Internet of Things (IoT) business line, using disruptive technology to build a smarter, more connected world. It’s a team of passionate intrapreneurs working to create connected environments and unlock the value of such environments for business and community customers. Keep reading to learn about Cox2M’s technologies, projects and how you can get involved!
1. Cox2M is all about creating connections.
Launched in 2017, Cox2M is a new business line providing connected asset services. Cox2M seeks to unleash the power of a connected world, delivering solutions that promote frictionless interactions between people and things.
2. Cox2M is building smart communities.
More than ever, cities need to leverage network and IoT technologies, alongside innovative public-private partnership, to build resilient and forward-looking smart city infrastructure that supports next-generation data driven services and improves the quality of life for residents and visitors alike.
Cox2M is a true partner to community leaders, a platform that enables them to frictionlessly identify and deploy smart city infrastructure and solutions to solve complex problems, like improving traffic, conserving energy and water and more. Connectivity is core to Cox Communications’ mission, and it’s exciting to see it come to life through disruptive IoT technologies.
3. Cox2M is driving automotive innovation.
You might be familiar with Cox Automotive. But did you know that Cox2M is supporting CAI in digitally transforming their industry too?
It started in 2018 with LotVision, a one-of-a-kind asset-tracking solution that manages the location and status of millions of cars each year for dealers and customers like our very own Manheim auto auctions. Fast-forward to today: Cox2M continues to expand solutions to new customers and changing industry needs. From diagnostic monitoring to frictionless vehicle tracking, the team at Cox2M is putting the pedal to the metal on automotive innovation.
4. Cox2M has completed some groundbreaking projects.
Cox2M has already generated success stories that illustrate the power of cohesive, end-to-end IoT solutions. Some examples:
5. There are jobs available with Cox2M!
Now that you know about Cox2M, imaging joining the team that’s creating these futuristic solutions! We’re hiring for roles in technology, sales, strategy, research and more.
Check out job openings here and remember that you can always sign up for our Talent Community if you want to see future opportunities.
We’re changing out our tools to provide a better experience for you. Between June 16-22, we will not have any open jobs published on our careers website, but please join our talent community and come back after June 22 to search and apply. Thank you!