A while back, our teams at Gett had an awesome in-house Hackathon, so we had a chance to explore some interesting ideas to improve Gett’s ride-hailing app and rider experience.
My team’s idea was to improve the rider experience while they wait to be matched with an available taxi, as well as during the ride itself, by developing a super simple “time-spender” single-tap game to amuse our users.
The idea for the game was a simple 2D game showcasing the player (a taxi) on the open road, with the goal of collecting as many riders as possible while avoiding COVID-19…
The past year has been challenging in so many ways.
COVID-19 forced us all to thrive working remotely, for both our customers and our own employees. During this past year, most of modern society inevitably adapted to the situation.
Work/life balance
At Gett, we also adapted and introduced Gett Flexi so our employees get the ultimate freedom of choice — between a 4-day week vs. 5-day week, as well as working from office or the comfort of their home.
No matter how well you adjust to working remotely though, trying to figure out how to plan a Company Hackathon, an event which…
Full disclosure — I am not Tom Cruise (Shocker, I know 🙃). What I am, is an Incident manager, who, not unlike Ethan hunt (portrayed by the mighty Tom), also has to deal with uncertainties in life and surprises. All the more in this day and age where COVID-19 forced us all to stay at home and be introduced to a new reality. In the following blog post, I’ll share the change our IM (Incident Management / Impossible Mission) process underwent to support working from home.
Monitoring — tweaking the “false positives”
The number one tool of an Incident Manager is an extensive monitoring system.
As…
Transforming rare categorical values into “Other” with a single line of code
When working with categorical features, a common approach is to use one-hot-encoding and create a binary feature for each possible category. For example:
Every Escalation engineer knows this simple truth — “if you find it faster, you will solve it faster” (“it” being the incident you want to avoid). To detect those pesky incidents, we invest a lot of money in various application performance monitoring (APM) tools, and most of us use the out-of-the-box functionality these tools offer.
But, what if I told you that you can save hundreds of thousands of yearly dollars if you take a step further and create transaction-specific alerts and be aware about third-party elements affecting your system. Would you like to know more? …
Keep up with the latest additions in Go error handling
This post is part of the “Before you go Go” series, where we explore the world of Golang, provide tips and insights you should know when writing Go, so you don’t have to learn them the hard way.
The last time we visited this topic, we explained some core concepts in this area and how to handle errors properly. I recommend you take a look at the previous post, available here:
This time around, you’re going to update your stance on Error Handling in Go while taking a look at the changes and additions done in Go 1.13. …
One of my favorite proverbs of all times is this:
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life” (Attributed to Maimonides, 12th century A.D).
Why do I like this proverb so much? Because it embodies a great truth in it that we should all implement in our day-to-day work as IT professionals: Share your knowledge.
The more you share, the better your business will become as more and more professionals will be able to operate both the system and problems that may occur (I do…
When I started my journey in the IT world, my badge bore the motto of the company that saw fit to grant me this opportunity (Comverse technologies, you are forever in my mind 😃): “Our goal is to meet or exceed our customers’ expectations”.
Take a moment and think about this motto. We all want to do a good job in service of our customers, but the thing that defines a successful service is when you foresee what your customer needs before they know it themselves. …
Get started with Apple’s Combine with your existing RxSwift knowledge
Update: This cheatsheet is available as a Markdown table, as well as searchable CSV tables in the following repo: https://github.com/freak4pc/rxswift-to-combine-cheatsheet. Thanks Joe Blau for the help and inspiration!
Update 2: I’ve released a library called RxCombine which provides a proof-of-concept for Bi-directional type bridging between RxSwift and Apple’s combine, letting you mix and match the two in your code as needed. I hope you’ll enjoy it! 😇 https://github.com/freak4pc/RxCombine
What a crazy WWDC week we’ve had! So many new things to learn and dig into :)
One of these new things was Combine, Apple’s asynchronous event-handling framework, now built into the…
Here at Gett, we have several degrees for production environment related issues:
- 🔨 Trivial: A small issue that affects the occasional user in a remote aspect of the application
- ⚠️ Medium: slightly more inconvenient, but not business disrupting
- ❗️ Critical: a potentially business affecting issue if not treated within the next few days
- 🔥 Fire: A “Drop everything you’re doing and fix this issue now” type of situation. It has a critical effect on the business and users are currently experiencing severe degradation while using the service
In the following blog post, I’ll review one such “Fire” incident we managed…
Gett Engineering
Code, stories, tips, thoughts, experimentations from the…
