What does the project do?
Gearset is a Salesforce DevOps tool with features such as backups and deployments to assist companies using Salesforce.
How is it made?
The frontend is a mixture of React and Knockout and the backend is primarily C#.
Which bits did I do?
I was based in a team responsible for data deployments (copying data from one org to another), which involved doing lots of small fixes for customer issues and general maintenance. We also had a full project to add configurable banners to the pipelines screen, involving building out frontend, backend and database schemas from scratch.
How is the company organised?
Detailed version: engineering values.
Quick version:
- We release the app twice per day. More info here!
- Everything is unit tested.
- A culture of giving feedback about everything.
- Very close interaction between customers and engineers.
- Hyper-iterative development: reducing projects to the bare minimum before shipping to the customer and iterating upon feedback.
- Engineers do a variety of different things to gain an understanding in everything (including frontend, backend, QA, infrastructure, internal tools etc.).
- Everyone is very talented and works really well as a team.
What have I learnt?
Some things I have learnt:
- Learning from feedback and putting it into practice.
- Using git rebase and the importance of a tidy commit history.
- Reviewing other people's PRs and delivering useful feedback.
- Collaborating effectively with people in the office and working remotely.
- Writing and interacting with complex SQL queries.
- Using extensive unit testing to validate assumptions and prevent regression of the software.