Article written by Bárbara Barbosa. The content was also released on Analytics Vidhya.

Have you ever wondered how you would give feedback to a person who forgot to label the x-axis of a chart?

When I started to work as a back-end developer, it was the wild west. I could deploy without anyone looking at my code, and I would only know that something had gone wrong when a client called to let me know something had crashed. One day, through a conversation at an event, I discovered the existence of Pull Requests (PRs)! With them, other developers could see my code and give me various feedbacks, such as how I could improve my code and what the good practices were for their respective implementations. There are numerous advantages to working with Pull Requests, but I found that the most amazing one was the sharing of knowledge they enabled. …

By Karoline Leite

I want to hire women in tech, but I never get any female applicants.

Has this ever happened to you? You have an opening in your technology team, you divulge it, and are careful in making women the priority. Nonetheless, you end up with 100 male applicants and just 1 woman — and her résumé isn’t as good as the men’s.

You become disappointed with the lack of engagement on the part of the women, with their lack of desire to join your company; disappointed that they would disregard an opportunity to work at a company as cool as yours. …

By Ronaldo Marciano

Disclaimer: This article was published on 05/2018

This week, I finished my eighth month here at Creditas and conducted my first feedback canvas with the entire technology team. Feedback often pushes me outside of my comfort zone, which is a benefit I had been missing prior to our canvas.

Besides explaining how we conduct our feedback, the canvas and grading scale we used will be linked at the end of this article.

Motivation

Every six months at Creditas, we have a performance review cycle, which evaluates how much one is accomplishing. At the time this article was written, the person responsible for evaluating and giving feedback to the team was our then VP of Engineering(Leonardo Andreucci). …

By Vagner Ferreira Santos

Web application interfaces are getting more complex with every passing day. It’s more content than the restrictions of a screen can encapsulate. To deal with this, we must break the content down into pieces that are displayed according to the user’s interactions. This is where animation plays an important role.

Animations are especially useful when it comes to displaying new content, giving feedback for interactions, complementing written content, and informing the status of requests.

Displaying new content

Whether it’s an informational modal or an options menu, when components are displayed in response to an action (ex: a button that can be clicked), the response should not be abrupt. Applying a smooth transition helps the brain to process the change, creating a visual connection between the previous state and the current state. This technique makes sure the user understands the path from one display to another, and how their actions are related to the transition between states. …

By Sergio Furio, CEO at Creditas

Planning and projection are terms that are usually used interchangeably to refer to the process that attempts to determine what will happen in the future of an organization, especially regarding the areas of sales and marketing. At
Creditas, we like to make the difference between the two concepts clear.

Companies of all sizes experiment with all kinds of different processes to define the objectives for the upcoming month, quarter, or year. This process is usually a mix of art and science, and it tends to involve members from various areas such as sales, marketing, operations, product, technology, and finance. …

By Hélio Costa

You don’t need to follow the “testing world” to know what refactoring means. This word, which is used daily in technology departments, presents itself in two distinct moments throughout development:

The Miracle of Code Refactoring

• Refactoring: the third step of Test-Driven Development (Red, Green, Refactor);
• Refactoring existing production code

For now, I’m only going to address the second item.

The need for refactoring arises when one or more programmers have pinpointed a certain snippet of code and determine it isn’t constructed in an acceptable way.

Thus, a wise person should remember what refactoring means: keeping the behavior of the part that’s to be substituted. …

By Hélio Costa

Some time ago I heard the following statement:

“I believe that unit tests are important; however, I see no need to carry out TDD.”

How is this possible?

Separating things: Unit Tests

Unit tests are meant to guarantee that a certain business rule is executed as it was solicited/described by the software stakeholders. A test should only cover one scenario; which will come out either happy (a happy path), or a failure. …

By Ann Williams (Chief Operating Officer).

B. Quaresma used to play soccer professionally. Bia is a ballerina. Vinicius composes music, plays numerous instruments, and sings.

Rodrigo has been working with loans for over five years. Derick worked at two startups, where he led customer service. Ana studies psychology.

What do these people have in common? They’re part of our team of secured lending consultants here at Creditas. During the workday, their passion is to help Brazilians take out loans with fair interest rates to actualize the projects they dream about.

Here at Creditas, a business consultant doesn’t need experience in the field to become part of our team. We value diverse experiences, people who see the world differently. Why? Because above all, we value our clients. Our clients come from different industries, with diverse experiences and different ways of seeing the world. In order to find the best solution for them, we first need to understand them. …