Ziegert Group Tech Radar — Summer 2022
This article was co-authored by Richard Sandoval
Intro
Last year we presented our Tech Radar. It was a fair assessment of the state of our tech stack at that moment but time flies and here we are again to present you the updated version for summer 2022.
There were a few changes and we will highlight some of them in the rest of this article.
Tests
Last year, we were getting started with improving our QA setup and we had put to trial Cypress.
Since then, we not only have fully adopted Cypress but also Playwright. Why the two of them? Because as Ziegert is growing, we have different platforms with different requirements.
Playwright helped us to write end-to-end tests with cross-domain, especially when testing a booking feature that used a Calendly widget. At the time, Cypress was unable to access the widget and Playwright fitted right in.
Improving our knowledge of Playwright over time, we noticed more interesting features that make it a great alternative to Cypress, for example, the ability to run tests in parallel or to test in multiple browser tabs. We plan to keep adopting both technologies for now, and the choice of which one to use will be up to the team.
In the case of unit tests, we started to use a kind of peculiar library, MSW. This library allows us to create a mock of our HTTP request as well as our GraphQL Queries and Mutations, making our tests more reliable, as well as decreasing the time it takes us to create them.
Infrastructure
We have made great progress in our journey in the infrastructure as code world and a few tools stood out. One thing we have accomplished is to ensure that most if not all our applications have their infrastructure managed by AWS CDK.
CDK is an awesome tool but maybe not the easiest one to use, which is why in one of our teams, for Metatrust, we have fully adopted Serverless-Stack or SST for short. SST is an awesome set of tooling that enable our team to create, maintain and overview serverless apps in one place. It uses CDK behind the hood but serves as a developer-friendly layout that lets you create your stacks in TypeScript directly.
Frontend frameworks
During the past year, we have made some decisions on our frontend frameworks too. For one internal project, we had experience with Chakra-UI. While this framework is very neat and we enjoyed working with it, it missed a lot of components we did not want to have to write ourselves like advanced Table structures. For our new platforms, we have adopted the industry standard Material-UI. Both sets of components are compatible and we can slowly phase out one for the other without too much hassle.
Another benefit of Material-UI is that it comes hand in hand with @emotion which we want to focus on going forward.
One detail that we couldn’t miss is that one of our teams has decided to migrate their main web application to Next.JS, due to the size and complexity of the application, this team decided to use an approach called “Incremental Adoption”, which allows them to gradually transfer page per page instead of moving the whole app.
Conclusion
Building our tech roadmap gives us the occasion to sit down and reflect on our past tech choices and see where we want to go as a group. As the group keeps expanding and new teams are created, it becomes even more critical to have a common overview of the tools we use.
You can expect to see updates of our tech radar regularly over here. This is a journey we are keen to share as technology choices always differ from one company to another, depending on the need and it is always a sound idea to compare us with others and see why paths converge and, sometimes, diverge. If you want to keep following us you can do so right here on medium.
If you want to build your own Tech Radar, look at this open-source library.
