Reset

Sometimes in tech, you just need to click reset

The story is heard a thousand times in the tech world: a company focuses on growth and finding product-market fit in their first few years, so now they have a huge monolithic codebase and need to rebuild it. Well, “Hi!” We’re JOOR and we fall into the same bucket. I’m Derek, the CTO, and I have been building tech and tech teams for nearly 15 years. I started at Google where I started and led the G-Suite product. After a few startups I got into the political world as Deputy CTO on the Hillary campaign. I’ve also advised and worked with dozens of startups for many years. This is the story I hear time and time again, happening at large companies and small but the fun part about JOOR is that it’s different for us.

The big difference? We got to click reset.

Beginning of 2017, the company entered a new phase with a new executive team. The team is focused on taking all the things JOOR has been great at and doubling down on it. On the tech side, this breath of fresh air is allowing us to rethink everything both on the technology front and around the kind of tech team we build.

On the tech side:

• We’re moving from a PHP monolith to Django and React
• We’re moving away from REST and developing our new APIs on GraphQL
• We’re figuring out how to balance the needs of business clients with the needs of the platform
• We’re moving from snowflake servers over to Docker & Kubernetes with a CI/CD setup
• We’re building ETL pipelines to process gigabytes of data in the wholesale space

On the team & culture side:

• We’re focusing on diversity and inclusiveness with explicit day-to-day tactics, not just giving it lip service
• We’re building a tech team that collaborates with pair programming, open design reviews and agile processes
• We’re building a remote-equal culture with engineering teams across the globe
• We’re building devops into our culture so that every engineer is empowered to unblock themselves

This blog is going to be a story of how we accomplish these things (or our learnings as we hit bumps along the way). Little of this stuff is new or revolutionary, but the tech industry as a whole only improves as we share our stories and lessons learned. We believe in JOOR’s mission to become the de facto platform for the wholesale industry and we’re building out the technology and tech team to do just that.

If this is intriguing to you, we’re hiring.