Life as a developer at EDITED
I started as a software engineer four years ago. I was fresh out of a masters at Imperial College London and ready to dig my teeth into difficult problems at an exciting start up. Since then, EDITED has added over 400 servers, moved office, created a New York HQ, tripled its headcount and so much more…
But most of all, we’ve shipped a bloody brilliant product.
What we do
The dev team at EDITED is responsible for creating a product that has revolutionised the way the retail industry works. It’s an exciting challenge because nothing like it existed before. Now, most of the brands you buy your clothes from use our app to make better decisions on what styles they should stock, how they should price them or when they should discount or replenish them.
So we’re creating waves of change within the retail industry but one thing that hasn’t wavered in the past four years is the culture and dedication on the dev team. If you watch this video you’ll see that we’re passionate about creating the best product we can, in the best way possible.
How we get the job done
We review our technology stack regularly to make sure that what we’re using is sane and future proof. Since I started we’ve gone from a Backbone.js application with 30 second rebuild times (courtesy of require.js) to a React, Redux and Radium application with hot reloading — significantly cutting the time to see the changes we make in the code reflected in the browser.
At the same time, on the back end we’ve moved from an 18 machine MongoDB cluster to a 5 machine Riak cluster that holds 20 times the amount of data. We take the time to learn about new technologies because they can often improve our developer experience.
We value collaboration
Developer experience isn’t just about the technologies you use, but also the development process. We’re constantly making sure our process is as frictionless as possible, and that it allows us to maintain the high quality of code that we’re looking for.
We often pair, and we always make sure code is reviewed by at least one other developer before it goes into production. I can’t overstate the benefits of sharing knowledge through these mechanisms — it makes us all better engineers.
As an engineer at EDITED, our process allows you to be a part of a project from start to finish.
From design, to user testing, to technical planning and then implementing both the back end and the front end — you can have your say on every stage of the process.
Having said that, you don’t have to cover the full stack. You get to choose which bits of a project you’d like to work on, and if you want to learn about something in particular, if it fits in with our plans, then you can focus on that. I’ve helped data scientists to build React frontends for internal tooling, and front enders to focus on building image processing services.
Once you’ve finished working on something, it’ll go straight into the hands of customers, and you can feel proud of what you’ve done.
Learning matters to us
At EDITED we learn by doing, choosing projects that interest and challenge us. We push each other through pairing, reviewing and internal presentations. We also draw on the larger community at conferences. There’s five of us heading to React Europe in 2017.
All that isn’t only indicative of how well we get along within the team but within the whole company. When we play dodgeball, go to the pub or go on holiday during the annual retreat, we go as a company, not just the “dev team”.
If you feel like this is the sort of place you’d like to work, I want to hear from you. It doesn’t matter what you want to focus on, or whether you’re straight out of university, or you have 10+ years of experience, get in touch or apply on our jobs page.
If you’d like to know any more, then please get in touch with me on Twitter @bobbyrenwick or come and see us at stand 203 at Silicon Milk Roundabout this Sunday, November 27.
Oh! And please follow this publication below, there’s some exciting stuff from the dev team coming soon that you’ll definitely want to read.
