Hey! We are Product Development, aka the R&D team! 👋🏼
We build and run the &frankly service, used by hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of users globally -and growing by the day!
We have a calm environment at not much more than an arm’s length from the company fridge, get to choose our own hardware and have free choice on what to spend our education budget on. Our team is very diverse, with an open and collaborative culture. We love discussing problems and helping each other peer review code. Several of us go to meet-ups and we easily outnumber all other departments at the monthly social activities and free beer, wine, champagne and snacks-Friday-After-Works :)
The entire product team works in a Kanban manner, continuously pulling tasks from our JIRA backlogs, and deploying new functionality several times a week. Most developers are involved in the full product lifecycle - from concept to deploymen - and have the opportunity to take part in DevOps tasks if desired. We communicate with each other via Slack or grab a whiteboard when needed, documenting our work in Confluence and through code annotations to auto-generate API docs.
We are split into:
Product, who sets the product roadmap and decides what features to build next. Talking to customers, sales and customer success colleagues we try to understand the most sought-after features our users want and create design concepts and mock-ups to illustrate how they would work. We work with a product backlog in JIRA and Trello using Kanban & stand-ups, design in Adobe, Sketch & Zeplin, post-its and print-outs, and provide UI/UX artifacts to the front-end and app teams.
App development works remotely, implementing our design ideas into responsive and visually stunning native iOS and Android apps in Objective-C/Swift and Java/Kotlin. Our app team uses MVVM/MVP patterns and ReactiveX/Observer pattern style architectures, Fabric/Crashlytics, Firebase and a host of other tools, making use of core app features such as location, notifications and much more.
Front-end crafts beautiful and functional web components based on design mock-ups, using JavaScript ES6 and React.js, css-modules and postcss for styling. Testing is done with Jest and Enzyme and Webpack is used as a bundler/task runner. During development, we use both storybook and a local backend instance running inside Docker.
Lastly, our Back-end team builds and operates the &frankly platform, utilizing Terraform and Docker to deploy scalable microservices on AWS clusters, and a CI/CD flow based on Jenkins running unit & integration tests. Our backend is built on Spring Boot, following best practices like immutability by default, SOLID and KISS. We use VAVR functional-like framework as well as the new Java 8 features (like it's asynchronous API) and RxJava. We store data in MySQL & MongoDB and are actively working on scaling mechanisms such as caching and queuing architecture to support future growth, as well as experiment with big data/ML on our dataset. We monitor our service using Grafana/Graphite and AWS monitoring services and employ a wide number of security mechanisms to protect our service and customer data. We also maintain some legacy components and our marketing web in PHP, and use a mix of other languages for DevOps tasks.
Does this sound like something that could make you smile at work? Then connect with us :)
