Welcome back, from the CTO of BlaBlaCar

Olivier Bonnet, CTO of BlaBlaCar.

A few months ago, in light of the escalating coronavirus crisis, the BlaBlaCar team did the unthinkable: we asked the members of our community not to travel. It was a tough decision to make for a mobility platform, and a challenging one to execute, but we all knew it was the right thing to do. Today, as the platform reopens, and people start to travel again, I’d like to reflect back on how BlaBlaCar’s Product & Engineering team managed this unprecedented crisis. Here is an overview of what we’ve been up to in the last few months, of our innovations and breakthroughs, and of the top 3 challenges ahead for BlaBlaCar engineers.

BlaBlaCar Engineering in a time of crisis

Running a shared mobility platform during a global pandemic isn’t easy. At BlaBlaCar, we are privileged to have a Product & Engineering Team that quickly adapted to the situation, with enough runway to focus on our innovation and product roadmap, and the strong conviction that we’ll come out stronger and more resilient from this crisis.

Following the shutdown and confinement of major cities in March, traffic fell close to zero in countries like France, Germany and Spain. We suspended our bus network in Europe, and soon thereafter, our co-Founder & CEO Nicolas Brusson sent an email to our community of carpoolers urging them not to travel.

Fortunately, our Engineering team had a strong remote culture before the outbreak, allowing us to transition to a full remote working environment quickly and efficiently. At the beginning, much of our effort was spent enforcing country & city directives around the world. We implemented these changes in a very short timeline to contain the spread of the virus:

• Reducing the allowed number of seats in cars to 1 or 2 (instead of 4).
• Shutting down booking and traveling in some cities (Moscow for instance).
• Adding an “Only One in the Back” feature to promote social distancing in cars.

In addition to responding to the crisis, we had the bandwidth to resume our projects, meetings, all-hands and the work on our backlog. This was an opportunity for our team to keep working on our roadmap, while transitioning to a remote and asynchronous culture of structured documentation, communication and decision-making. Having very little activity on the platform also allowed us to reprioritize some technical projects, including:

• Continue to reduce our technical debt.
• Moving our big PHP monolith to a service-oriented architecture. We’ve always been cautious in extracting services from our monolith, ensuring nothing would break in the process. With 90 millions members worldwide depending on our services to travel, we can’t afford to be malfunctioning. During confinement, however, we were able to allocate more time to tech migrations and take more risks without interrupting travel plans around the world.

How we organized a company-wide hackathon, remotely

At BlaBlaCar, we have regular hackathons — called Coding Nights — for employees to bond and innovate outside of their roadmap. We intended to postpone the event to later this year, but realized it would be the perfect opportunity to:

• Develop a software that would help the BlaBlaCar community during the crisis.
• Or develop internal tools to optimize our full-remote processes.

So, we turned our #CodingNight into a 48-hour #CovidFight!

We kickstarted the hackathon with a Call For Ideas, and received great responses from BlaBlaEmployees and the community. We were happy to see people from many teams show support to engineers and bring a range of skills to the table.

The hackathon led to many projects, such as:

• BlaBlaMingle: a Slack app that allows random groups within BlaBlaCar to virtually meet for coffee, lunch, games and more.
• BlaBlaDone: automates notification on pending merge requests so that people can focus on important interactions.
• Red Call: a communication tool called RedCall for the French Red Cross to mobilize volunteers around a crisis. It was created 2 years ago during another hackathon, but this time, a dedicated team worked to make it available to a larger number of associations.

Last but not least, it led to the creation of BlaBlaHelp, our newly-launched community app to help each other with grocery shopping.

A live #covidfight demo, where 6 projects were presented to BlaBlaEmployees.

BlaBlaHelp: widening our scope when travel is off limits

When our Call for Ideas went out to the community for the #CovidFight, asking how we could leverage our platform and global community in the fight against the virus, BlaBlaHelp arose with overwhelming popularity. From that moment on, we knew exactly what to do to keep our community connected when traveling was not in the cards. For many, buying groceries will be challenging for the foreseeable future. Applying our technical expertise to an app allowing people to help each other out seemed like the right thing to do.

In under 2 weeks, 30 employees across 11 teams rallied around BlaBlaHelp to deliver it on all platforms (iOS, Android, web). After 20 different versions, 106 merge requests, 300 commits, and countless work sessions with founders Frédéric Mazella and Nicolas Brusson, the app was live in 10 countries. It gathered 10,000 members within the first 24 hours.

Developing, testing and launching an MVP quickly and remotely is a remarkable show of teamwork, innovation, expertise, and dedication.

This is how we did it:

1. We brainstormed on the user journey.
2. We prioritized the features for the MVP.
3. The design team delivered a first version of the specs. This allowed us to iterate on the designs.
4. We did several QA sessions until we were happy with the product.

This is what we learned:

1. Remote work is not an obstacle for team spirit when you have an organized plan and set objectives.
2. We saw the power of having a design system: it allowed us to construct this new product very fast. We will also continue to push for more modularized features (being able to provide a BlaBlaCar login system to different services, for instance).

A working session for the BlaBlaHelp project, including founders Frédéric Mazzella and Nicolas Brusson.

Looking ahead: our top 3 challenges

Amid all of the chaos and uncertainty we are experiencing today, one thing is certain: shared road mobility — a safe, eco-efficient and affordable mode of transport — will come out stronger as a result. In the last few months, we made some minor changes to our roadmap in order to adapt to the current crisis. We might have to make a few more based on upcoming travel trends. However, our long-term product and tech vision remains unchanged.

Here is what we’ll be focusing on in the next few months:

1. Operationally adapt to a growing engineering team: we’re still growing quickly, still looking for talent, and will continue to adapt to working with a larger team. That means improving our Review and Test processes, aligning the team on coding and architecture rules, improving our communication, refining our onboarding process.
2. Technical migrations: our team is pursuing our shift to be 100% on Google Cloud and to fully rely on a services architecture.
3. Bring the best mobility products in a post-covid environment: we’re aiming to become a fully multimodal platform all in one app, with smart pricing and a better experience for our members. With the recent partnership around BlaBla Ride e-scooters, we also look forward to delving into the world of micro-mobility.

https://careers.smartrecruiters.com/BlaBlaCar

While the current context brings its challenges to the transport industry in the short-term, it is opening our eyes to all the innovation we can bring to our community and around our mobility platform. I am proud of how BlaBlaCar engineers quickly adapted and innovated in the face of a global crisis. BlaBlaCar is not only resilient in a time of crisis, but rises up and adapts itself to always be at the service of its members. Our company is built around a community. Whether our community is on the road or not, we will keep addressing the evolving needs of our members, by staying true to our culture, and by continuing to work with agility, creativity and innovation.