The Journey is the Reward

It was not so long ago that Marie Outtier and I were sitting in a basement (true… but it was not that bad) prototyping a demo for what Aiden was meant to be.

Since then we…

• statically typed everything. Not trying to be fancy here, and yes it was an excruciating effort. But every single day now we see the benefit of having moved from vanilla JS to Typescript.
• rewrote our data pipeline… twice. That hurts. But this stuff is like a moving target and doing it really well is a massive commitment (Airflow is helping though)
• open-sourced our testing framework (and we have some really cool stuff to share with the community really soon)
• hardly do any R these days (good or bad?)
• mypy-ed our Python code (let’s see how this one pans out)
• still have heated debates about whether we should do functional or OO (more to come on this in future posts).
• still like Terraform (not saying it did not get some convincing!)
• oh, right: we are still trying to figure out how to document things

But more importantly: I am really happy with the team and the culture here. We talk, we argue, we try things. There’s no top down, no “that’s the right way™️”. It’s fun.

And yet, somehow, we ship.

Here’s to the next 12 months!