Like many, many other companies, Fishbrain decided to close down the office two weeks ago. This was done as a response to the spreading SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease that comes with it. …

This is a story about one of those times you got to use some of that math they teach you in school. Recently here at Fishbrain, our team set out to improve how our users’ followings got reflected in their feed. …

Spoiler: Multiple databases out-of-the box are amazing. — In the backend team at Fishbrain, we care a lot about providing a stable and safe experience when handling our clients’ requests. A natural choice for us a few years back, when we chose to build what is now the core service in our backend setup, was therefore Ruby on…

Staying online and staying sane. — At Fishbrain, we have for little over a year relied on an on-call rotation in order to ensure that Fishbrain is constantly online. Having gone from previously running a tight ship and relying on server operations contractors, to managing our infrastructure ourselves with an in-house rotation, we’ve learnt a lot…

Removing friction from pull requests — At Fishbrain, code reviewing through pull requests is one of our backend team’s core pillars. It allows us to share knowledge, learn from others, and correct mistakes at an early stage. We never ship a feature without it going through code review first. As you might know and understand, this…

At Fishbrain, we have known for a while that our old admin panel was outdated. It was built using Angular.js and done so in a solid way. However, over time it became a hassle to maintain. Dependencies were getting out of date and incompatible with each other and the technologies…

How to (not) lose commits & alienate colleagues — Git is an amazing version control system and the obvious choice for a lot of software teams around the world. Fishbrain is no exception. However, as your team grows, so does the count of simultaneous features in development. …