Stable Diffusion has taken the world by storm. In 2022, OpenAI released its second iteration of DALL-E, the text-to-image generator. While it was very impressive, it was closed source and behind a paywall. That meant that the use-cases and media coverage of it was still limited. …

At Alan, we want our software engineers to focus on building delightful features for our members, not fixing their dev environment or wondering if their change will break production. In a word: efficiency, but efficiency that scales. We want no friction, or friction that nudges you in the right direction. …

This article was co-written with Cyril Chapellier. Last year, James (the founding father of the Alan claim engine) shared some details about how the engine works, its requirements and design principles. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here. In this article, part of the conclusion reads…

How Product Marketing enables Sales & Product to do what they do best I often get the question: “Concretely, what does Product Marketing do?” I usually share the following analogy: Product Marketing is like the best man or bridesmaid at a wedding between Sales & Product. Prior to the big day, Product Marketing asks the right and tough questions to make sure “she’s/he’s…

Alan has the reputation of being a company with “no meetings” and “no managers”. We thought it would be a good idea to let an Alaner, Antoine — that was doing meetings and has the title of Engineering Manager — a place to discuss those topics. We decided to interview…

In October 2020, we published a blogpost on why we decided to use AWS as a hosting provider. We also promised that we would challenge our setup every three years, with the next time at the end of 2021. A few months ago, we analyzed our infrastructure needs and risks…

Introduction At Alan, we are continuously improving our product to delight our members. One downside is that increasing our codebase size exposes us to security issues and vulnerabilities. Let me tell you about a story that happened recently. Discovery A few weeks ago, I was working on a feature, and I tried…

A step in our journey to improve Python typing in our code base, helping our developers along the way to read and write type safe code. One year ago, we showed how to add type checking to an existing code base in the article Python Typing with mypy: Progressive Type…

Wondering what it’s like to work at Alan? Judging by the uniqueness of our culture and questions in interviews, we wanted to dig in. — The Alan design team has doubled every year since 2019. Now we’re a team of 16 designers, working remotely across Europe on an experience that means the world to us: healthcare 💜 A few of us decided to answer your most frequently asked questions. Let’s go! Alan’s unique way of working