What better
way to start a blog…
Hello
This is part hello and part invitation. We’re looking for a rock solid front end engineer to come and join our team in building Vizibl, the SRM tool changing the way big businesses manage their supplier relationships.
Rather than simply posting on a job board and giving you the same old spiel about how we are going to change the world (though we are going to change the world) we thought we would introduce ourselves and show you some of the exciting things we’re up to.
Solving big problems
Behind every great product there’s a big problem that needs to be solved and those problems don’t come much bigger than procurement.
Procurement is the “action of obtaining or procuring something” and for big businesses this has always meant trying to acquire the
required items for a lower price than the previous period.
Vizibl aims to change that with a shift in focus from cost savings to a real return on relationships by driving key pillars like visibility for both the buyer and supplier companies, collaboration and a far deeper insight into how relationships are managed.
The devil is in the detail
Design plays a huge part in what we do. The procurement industry is accustomed to cumbersome, arcane products that require an instruction manual the size of the yellow pages just to switch them on. Vizibl stands apart from the crowd by focussing on great UX, stunning design and of course being mobile friendly backed up by innovative, intuitive functionality throughout everything we do.
All our products are designed and built for desktop, mobile and tablet (watches coming soon!) This has helped put the power of our tools into the hands of the procurement professionals on the move. Users can now take their latest performance review data directly to a meeting and interact with it or even access our task management features anywhere, anytime.
To make sure we keep a consistent style and can rapidly innovate on new features, we’re developing an in house style guide to allow our front end team and design team to always be aligned, elements to be reusable and work load for both teams reduced. Collaboration between our front end and design teams is a cornerstone of our methodology.
The right tools for the job
We’re a team that loves technology. From our overpriced alarm clocks to our watches that can do everything but tell the time - you name it we love it. Most of all we love to code. We are great believers in always being open to new ideas but we also make sure we aren’t selling short tools that have stood the test of time in favour of new shiny things just because they’re new and shiny.
Vizibl is a modern “single page” web application which talks to our backend through a REST API. The backend is written in Python and makes use of Flask, SQLAlchemy and a Postgres database. The platform is hosted on Amazon AWS to enable rapid scalability. OAuth is used throughout for seamless integration with a handful of smaller apps that also run off the Vizibl API.
On the front end, we’re using AngularJS. We choose Angular because it’s relatively simple to understand, but provides a powerful MVC framework and templating system for our fairly complex needs. We like to adopt the framework to our specific needs & angular encourages this strategy very well! Though we try to avoid including unnecessary JS libs (looking at you jQuery!) we’ve also done some interesting dataviz with d3.js and we couldn’t live without moment.js for anything datetime related.
Our templates are built mobile first with responsiveness and graceful degradation in mind. For styling, we’re using LESS to preprocess our CSS. We particularly like LESS for making responsive design easier to achieve and less repetitive. We adopt an object orientated approach to our CSS to maintain this and keep our CSS DRY.
As many of our enterprise clients require it, we begrudgingly support IE9+. But as it supports media queries and is a much better approximation of standards compliance than it’s predecessors — we only slightly hate it and wish it would die.
Page weight is our top priority with our mobile clients in mind, so we’re using a grunt build system to compile our application and minify our JS and CSS. Excitingly, we’re in the process of developing a test suite with Ghost Inspector, which allows us to automatically test all our modules and even provides screenshot comparisons to alert us to those “that couldn’t possibly affect that!” CSS fails.
You spend half your adult life at work
And where else would you rather be right? This is a statistic that is so often overlooked. Being comfortable and feeling inspired is critical to being able to deliver your best work and thats why as a company, OSL puts a huge amount of effort into developing our culture.
Everyone at OSL is able to manage their time with options to work from home or elsewhere throughout the week and flexible hours to suit child care or other personal needs. We achieve this with a variety of tools including Slack and ScreenHero so it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the office or on another continent. We’re firm believers that the only thing that matters are quality results — not time sat in front of a computer.
When you are in the office, you’ll be in our high spec Southbank space featuring a variety of workspaces and plenty of free coffee and even free beer!
We rely on open source software throughout our stack and we’re always on the look out for ways to give back. All our development team are encouraged to contribute to OSS they use or even create projects of their own.
For example, our backend team is developing a serialisation and marshalling framework for our API which is already in use in production on Vizibl and we intend to unleash it to the world very soon.
Up your street?
If OSL sounds like your kind of workplace and you happen to be a talented front end engineer — send us a CV! And if you’re not specifically up for a front end role but think you might have something else to bring to the table — do get in touch and we’ll see if we can work something out.
you can email us at sayhello@oldstlabs.co or download a copy of our job spec at http://oldst.co/1LNoDGW
