Welcome to the TouchBistro Software Development Blog

We’ve always been inspired by other organizations that share their engineering journeys with the wider community. As we grow here at TouchBistro, our team would like to contribute to that ecosystem. We hope to share some of the things we’ve learned building the many components that make up TouchBistro’s restaurant point-of-sale solution. And we intend to release some of the tools that we’ve created that make our developers’ lives easier.

To help start things off, we are going to hand things over to our Developer Acceleration team to talk about some of the changes they have championed over the past 12 months.

Hi, I’m Omar Sabry, and I lead the Developer Acceleration team at TouchBistro.

In 2019 we established a small team dedicated to tooling, automation and developer enablement which proved massively successful in helping to solve a number of operational issues related to the creation and delivery of our web software.

After the first six months of operation, we can report the following improvements:

• We now deploy working code to production 200+ times a month with zero deployment failures instead of a handful of times with ceremony and trepidation.
• Our developers report that we have eliminated up to an hour of manual effort in an average day. Some members of our operations team opened up entire days in their week that used to be spent on manual deployments, configuring CI pipelines and setting up new repositories.
• We raised the standards for the maintainability, observability and stability of our applications.
• Developers and quality analysts can now run other team’s applications with ease on their own machines, instead of working in a staging development environment or developing against inconsistent mocks and specifications.

By streamlining the developer experience, we realized other benefits that we did not expect. The shared practices and processes we introduced make it much easier for developers to switch teams. They can run and consume each other’s software much more easily. And the time it takes for new developers to get their first code into production went from being measured in weeks to just a couple days.

Today we are introducing ourselves, but in the coming weeks we look forward to sharing more of the specifics about what our team has done, in collaboration with the rest of the software development organization, to help deliver better software more quickly, safely and without fear. This will include open sourcing some of our internal tools — read more about the first of these here. We hope that our experiences can help other teams to improve their own software engineering practice.

Upcoming topics from the Developer Acceleration team:

• Boilerplate project and shared libraries
• Developer quality of life
• Continuous delivery at TouchBistro
• Instrumentation

Does TouchBistro sound like somewhere you might like to work? We are always looking for talented new team members. Check out https://www.touchbistro.com/careers/#open-positions to find the role that is right for you.