2023 Vouch Engineering Offsite
Steven Banks | Lead Software Engineer
The 2023 Vouch Engineering Offsite meeting took place from June 14–16 at “The Den” in Columbus, Ohio. I had only been at Vouch for about two months, so I had only seen a few of my co-workers in person at a collaboration event a few weeks back. This was going to be the entire engineering team in one place at the same time. I did not know what to expect, but I was excited.
The day kicked off with a spotlight session in which a representative from every team presented their team’s responsibilities and revealed a team mascot. This was highly entertaining as each team described why their mascot represented the team. I am on the Client Servicing team and our mascot was the platypus, with its adaptability accurately reflecting our team’s diverse skill set and capacity to work across diverse platforms, languages, and technologies.
Each session on the first day had some sort of presentation followed by an interactive part where the entire group got to participate. This was a great idea to get involvement and discussion from everyone and not just sit through lectures. The first session concluded with a game of Vouch Jeopardy with some work-related categories to test our knowledge. The game was a great way to stir up some competition and see how much we could recall about Vouch engineering and insurance in general.
The second session featured our Senior Staff Engineer Don Valdez giving a talk about System Architecture and the process for migrating from a monolith to a microservices architecture. It ended with each table taking a domain concept, trying to describe all the actions/verbs of that domain, with the end goal of trying to understand what a microservice for that domain might look like.
After a good lunch we reconvened and discussed developer experience and observability and monitoring across our vast array of services and dependencies. It can be a bit overwhelming to think of all the pieces/parts that go into Vouch’s technology stack. We concluded the session with each table attempting to diagram all of those services and dependencies, and thinking through things like throughput, single points of failure, and communication links between services.
The last bit of the day was a fun team-building exercise where the entire group split up into groups of designers and builders. Our job as teams was to build a lego hedgehog. Seems easy, but the catch was that only the lead designer could see how the hedgehog was to be built. They had to describe it using only words to the lead engineer, who then had to take those directions to the team of builders. Describing a lego construction with no pictures seemed like a near impossible task. And we were given a 20 minute time limit to do it all! Well some teams succeeded and others not so much, but each team had a great time in the process!
Day 2 was all about the hackathon. Ideas were compiled beforehand and people chose which idea they wanted to work on. We split the groups between two locations so that there was room to work. There were five members of my team and we worked on a CLI tool to spin up all the dependent services required for a single application or workflow when running our software locally. We worked on it for a maximum of about six hours with each team member making contributions along the way. The entire group reconvened over at the Den and we began presenting our work.
The team presentations were impressive, to say the least. In less than a full day of work, every group was able to accomplish a lot. Some of the projects worked on were a proprietary feature flag solution, a health check for all our services that goes beyond standard heartbeat functionality, a ChatGPT solution to get information about potential customers, as well as helper projects such as auditing/updating system tests, a document marathon to update stale documentation, generating automated test data, and adding more automation to our deploy process.
There are initiatives to expand this hackathon in the future to allow for more time. It’s exciting to think about how much the engineering team could improve their work environment and create innovative solutions if given more time. This would be time well spent, for sure.
The day concluded with everyone heading over to 16-Bit Bar+Arcade for the Engineering Cocktail Hour. This was a unique location. It was completely open to the street and inside were a bunch of retro pinball machines and arcade games. What a great venue for this group! Good times were had by all, and who could pass up a game or two of the classic NBA Jam or NFL Blitz?
After this, each team headed to a local restaurant to have a team dinner. Our team headed to “The Pearl”, a fancy steak/seafood restaurant. This was an enjoyable time to connect with members of your team in an informal setting. After dinner, some folks stayed and hung out afterwards in the area.
I did not know what to expect going into this meeting but I was pleasantly surprised. I think the best part about all of it was just seeing my coworkers face to face and getting a chance to get to know them better. That level of interaction was priceless and somewhat difficult to come by in a remote working environment. Seeing folks over Zoom is just not the same, so the value that an offsite meeting like this brings is immeasurable and definitely brings the team closer together. Overall these couple days were a smashing success, and I’m already looking forward to the next one.
