The Way Forward

The Social Tables Engineering Team Plans for 2015

Best. Second Day. Ever.

On my second day at Social Tables, the engineering team spent an entire day out of the office, discussing some of the growing pains facing the team and, most importantly, how to address them. It was a very candid conversation and really helped to validate my choice of working at Social Tables.

var style_guides = true;

With “Ship all day. Party all night” hanging proudly on the lobby wall, Social Tables engineers pride ourselves on getting new features to customers A$AP. This has lead to a code base in need of a good ole’ refactor; both for functionality and readability.

Readability becomes increasingly important as an engineering team grows in size and our brand new Javascript and CSS style guides will help to codify our coding standards. These are two living documents that we will expand on over time.

var tests = true;

When you’re a small team with a small code base, it is easy to regression test the entire product. Why write tests when you can create new features? But as the team grows, 14 engineers as of this writing, and the code base grows, this becomes a more laborious process. New engineers have no way to confidently validate that they are not breaking any existing code and no one is capable of keeping the entire codebase in their head.

We all agreed that tests were necessity, but where to start? What do you test? What testing framework best suits the needs of Social Tables? In the end, we chose Mocha and Jest for our Node and React testing respectively and are aiming for 30% code coverage by the end of Q1.

var work_life_balance = undefined;

This was probably the hardest topic to tackle. Everyone has a different idea of what their perfect work-life balance is and we engineers are a special group. We sit in front of computers for hours at work, only to leave work and do the exact same thing in our spare time. To any ‘normal’ person, this probably sounds crazy. My response to these people is always “Imagine if you got paid to do what you love?”

We all wrote down and shared amongst each other what our perfect work-life balance would be and ironically they were all very similar. We quickly realized we needed an official company policy on certain things that mattered most to us.

return improvements;

These are topics that all engineering teams will confront at some point in time. I believe that with a combination of solid leadership and open communication, a good team will always be better for it.