Engineering Year in Review 2019

2020 Focus

• Now that we have the happy path journey in product we have a much better understanding of what the journey looks like, as well as a lot of history of what our unhappy paths look like. This learning will help us to improve our modelling of the process to better facilitate future changes as well as facilitating the manual processes for our unhappy paths. These changes will also help reduce the complexity of the system.

• At the moment we have a monolith API project and a monolith App project. CI build times are 13 minutes for the app (15 minutes to fully deploy) and 6 minutes to build the API (30-40 minutes to fully deploy due to deploying and running e2e tests). We have laid the groundwork converting them to Lerna monorepos and hope to reduce the build times (especially locally) by separating out packages in both projects.

• As the team grows focusing on maintaining developer productivity is crucial. A few pain points we know about and will work on are:  our test data for the service tests, re-working code to the current standard and paradigm if we touch it in a meaningful way.

• With flexible work a continuing mega-trend this decade, we want to make sure remote working is built into our culture. Whilst we aren't remote first Hatch does embrace flexible working (work from home Wednesday!) and a number of the engineering team are planning remote work trips this year. Whilst internally we are comfortable working together remotely, we want to lean into ensuring our remote practices and interactions with the wider team are equally as second nature as it is internally.

• More blogging!!

Most excited for in 2020

• 2020 is all about growth at Hatch and we are super excited about helping our new marketing team crush their growth goals!

• As we transfer our matching learning into more robust systems we are starting to integrate our data science code into our primary code bases. This adds interesting and new technical challenges as we embrace polyglot code bases.

• From a technical perspective, automating our back-office integrations in 2020 is an exciting new challenge.

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