Engineering

Recently our CEO Raj Kumar spent a week in our Barcelona office where the majority of our engineering department is located. I was working on some ideas for him to meet the team and get some insights into our daily work. While most of the company is aware of UI/UX and front-end changes we are doing to our site, some of the back-end and infrastructure work can seem like black magic. I think it is important to take every opportunity to bring this output closer to the rest of the company and especially the leadership. ...

When I joined Devex a bit more than six years ago most of the code base was in one large monolith. This monolith was based on Ruby On Rails and was responsible for delivering devex.com. This part was called “neo”. I guess because it was a rewrite of a previous Java version. I am not sure if it was a reference to Matrix or the Greek meaning. There were already some initiatives in place rewriting parts of it in different services, but the monolith was always looming in the background. Any changes to it required increasing amount of work. It was like someone tried to put the definition of technical code into code. ...

When I wrote the review of The Manager’s Path I started to think about other books I wish I had read earlier. Usually these triggered some kind of change in how I approach my work or life. This list is definitely incomplete and I will add more to the goodreads list at the bottom of this post. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck I still remember when and where I read this for the first time. It was on a plane from the US OSCON back to London where I had my start-up. ...

John Resig: Write Code Every Day http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/ Agilar: Scrum teams: self-organizing or self-directed? http://blog.agilar.org/index.php/2014/04/09/scrum-teams-self-organizing-or-self-directed/ etsy engineering youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/etsyengineering

Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript. I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics. I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia. There are no pictures in the slides … sorry.