For workaholics like myself, the prospect of a holiday can feel akin to the impending doom of a critical system outage. The thought of being offline, disconnected from the digital pulse of the business, is enough to trigger anxiety. For years, I made sure that even on vacation, I could…
At ToolTime we have (at the time of writing this post) a team of 20 Software Engineers and 3 Product Designers. Smooth collaboration is always a challenge when a team consists of more than, ehm, 1 person 😀. And more problems can become prominent when the collaboration is cross-functional. Product Designers…
Foreword Like so many applications out there, our WebApp MVP was initially generated with the popular create-react-app command-line tool. It makes things very easy at first: no need to think about how to set up a local server, a bundler, a compiler, typescript config, how to support multiple content types,…
4-tier architectureWhile it's not something you would want to start with (well, unless you already have all the building blocks) a micro-service oriented architecture comes with more gains than pains. What you are looking at is the current state of TT architecture. Yes, You can probably recognise the pattern -…
Recently, we had our first Hackathon at ToolTime. It was really exciting and gave birth to a large number of ideas that can potentially help ToolTime grow even more. But an idea is worth nothing without the implementation. And as a Software Engineer I was part of that implementation. So,…
At ToolTime, like in every engineering organisation, we have a lot to do: build new features, scale existing ones, tidy existing code, improve architectures, fix bugs, update tools, research new solutions, imagine the future, et cetera, et cetera… With this many responsibilities, and the backlog endlessly full of new potential…
> The path to arrive at the goal is more important than the goal itself. (Someone said that, probably not Lao Tzu) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction: what we had to accomplish In ToolTime we have currently three autonomous squads, following the Agile principles of self-organising and cross-functional teams. The squad in which I…
If your React application is difficult to maintain it might be due to the lack of separation of concerns, ToolTime's Apps were encountering such difficulties a year ago. The newly hired Engineering Team decided to transform an experimental MVP application, which was mixing concerns and therefor hard to maintain, into…
