All the posts for Category: Shutl

April 26, 2019 Customer Service, Shutl

Swapping Fridays—Improving Customer Experience with Role Swapping

Shutl has been running an initiative called Swapping Fridays. This involves software engineers and customer service agents swapping roles for a day. This article discusses how the initiative was run, the objectives and outcomes, and some challenges that were encountered along the way.

June 15, 2018 Culture, Shutl, Tech

Swap jobs, become more agile!

At Shutl, we strive to be as agile as possible in our daily work. Being agile is not about using coloured post-it notes, having stand-up meetings, or about writing code like a headless chicken. Being agile is about adaptation: an agile team is able to constantly adapt to the environment despite time pressures, demanding clients,…

May 11, 2018 Shutl, Tech

Functional Thinking

Functional Programming is more than a set of principles. It’s a paradigm; a different way of thinking. It focuses on the “what” is being done, as opposed to the “how” it’s being done as in Object Oriented and Imperative paradigms. The first functional programming language was created in 1960 (LISP), but interestingly, Functional Programming is…

April 19, 2018 Shutl

Books that made the biggest impact on me

I have came across a lot of posts and tweets where someone talks about books they have read recently, that had a big impact on their career or the way they work. There are the books that made an impact on my career. I’ve read quite few books, but when I think about it, few…

March 28, 2018 Culture, Shutl, Tech

InternShip

At Shutl we believe it is very important to be a part of the engineering community and make sure we give back to it. We know that the first steps for individuals are quite often the hardest and we aim to provide support where possible. For example, we have been long supporters and sponsors of…

June 5, 2017 Culture, Shutl

Taking Shutl on the road!

Everything started in Seattle last year. We were about to start working on eBay stack with our sister team located there. We came to Seattle to meet up with them and agree on the best way to collaborate on common codebase. We had the whole weekend free and we decided to go to Vancouver Island….

May 5, 2017 Shutl

Feature teams 101

When I joined the company there was only an engineering team. As we started to grow we ended up splitting into three teams. There was the mandatory platform team that doesn’t require further explanation. The other two teams had wittier names and focused on the different aspects of the business. One dealt with merchants, carriers…

April 27, 2017 Culture, Shutl, Tech

How to keep track of workload in an Agile manner

When you work on an Agile tech company like Shutl there are many things happening at the same time every week. Developers are constantly shipping new features and maintaining the company’s systems working to make clients happy. Sometimes this means adding features, sometimes this means fixing bugs that only manifest on remote corner cases and therefore…

March 24, 2017 Shutl, Tech

Make your integration tests faster using HSQL

Test Driven Development with Unit tests and Integration Tests The golden rule of Test Driven Development is never write new functionality without a failing test. Yes. You need to start each feature writing a failing acceptance test, which guides your application design and defines application behaviour. While this test is failing, the feature is not…

March 1, 2017 Shutl, Tech

TDD for your technical interview

That technical challenge is coming, and when it does, do you want TDD by your side? A true story A year ago I had no experience with tests. During an interview, I was given the task of writing a method that returns the nth number of the Fibonacci series, without using recursion. I was so excited…

February 23, 2017 Culture, Shutl

Distributed orchestration and consensus discovery with a low bandwidth asynchronous signalling protocol

Jazz hands for great meetings When grownups have meetings, they tend to have grownup meetings. When developers have meetings, they tend to just talk at each other for a while until they get bored.

February 9, 2017 Culture, Dev Ops, Shutl, Tech

Hacking your way into security training

As an eBay company, you would think that we feel nervous every time we hear from our InfoSec representatives. What is it now? A new scan, a pen test, an audit? Worse yet, a problem? Fortunately our representative does a great job bringing the different satellite companies together and this time he just wanted to…

January 30, 2017 Shutl, Tech

Noteworthy features of Spock — The finale

In this article we will continue exploring more interesting features that Spock has to offer: Let’s start with the old method: Consider a class that implements a buffer:

January 23, 2017 Shutl, Tech

Using test doubles in Spock – Part II

In our previous article, we covered some of the main features that Spock offers. In this article we will continue exploring the mocking capabilities of the framework. If we continue with our previous example of the REST API that tries to find an existing user in our system, probably the next step would be to…

January 17, 2017 Shutl, Tech

Enterprise testing with Spock – Part I

At Shutl, as an eBay company, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with different teams that are developing Java backend services, usually using JUnit and Mockito for their tests. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet people with a solid background in other tech stacks such as Ruby, Scala, Clojure, etc.

December 30, 2016 Shutl, Tech

Endpointer: For when your stack’s too big for your box

Working with a service-oriented architecture has many benefits and here at Shutl we try to take advantage of them. Creating different layers of services allows for potentially smaller, more reusable codebases that are easier to scale and more flexible in terms of the wide variety of technologies that can be used. At Shutl, our services…

November 23, 2016 Shutl, Tech

Add 10 percent to a number… What can possibly go wrong!?

One of the recruitment stages at Shutl is a pair programming exercise where candidates pair with one of our developers on adding couple of features to a small web service. One of the features includes adding a markup to the base price.

July 30, 2016 Shutl, Tech

Incorporate property testing to improve confidence in your code

Note: All the examples and libraries use clojure, but the content is portable on any language of your choice. Use Case Imagine you need a function which computes the average of values. Using TDD you might write your code likewise:

June 22, 2016 Shutl

Moving from Graphite to InfluxDB

For some time we have been collecting metrics using Statsd, feeding them into Graphite and alerting on them via Nagios. However, as we noted when we set this up, there are some drawbacks to this configuration. Graphite has a rather opaque configuration which is prone to errors which can lead to data loss. In fact,…

June 15, 2016 Culture, Dev Ops, Shutl

How to become a Devops Engineer for dummies!

If you were lured onto this article by the title, it did its job. What you will discover here is how a Junior Developer became part of a team that practices Devops by preparing to take on on-call duties.

January 25, 2016 Shutl, Tech

Clojure for fun and profit at Shutl

When we decided to build our Shutl iOS application we had some decisions to make. One of these decisions was the technology to use to build the backend.

October 25, 2015 Shutl

Rebuilding shutl.com using microservices and layer-7 load balancing

A few weeks ago we released a brand new version of shutl.com with our new branding, an updated look and clearer messaging. We also added the ability to book a Shutl delivery right from the homepage as we work to consolidate our various web offerings.

August 14, 2015 Shutl, Tech

Testing and Refactoring Legacy Code

You always use Test-Driven Development when developing a new feature for your favourite application, right? But today I’d like to talk about a different way of using tests; I’ll walk you through a recent experience that required working with legacy code. I’ll try to present a hands-on exercise, extracted from a real-life context, where we use tests to understand, refactor and…

June 10, 2015 Culture, Shutl, Tech

Everyone please stand up!

“Everyone please stand up!” That’s what at least one of us shouts at 11am every day. This is the time all engineers, project and product managers gather around the usual pairing station; a randomly nominated engineer fires up the shutl Google hangout session, makes sure the video and sound are working fine and any remote engineers also…

May 12, 2015 Shutl, Tech

Is duplication always a bad thing?

tl;dr No. Well, perhaps, but it can be the lesser of two evils. It depends.

April 1, 2015 Shutl, Tech

Functional iOS testing in Swift

One of the projects we are currently working on at Shutl involves building an iOS application. The application is essentially quite simple, it acts as a client for our API adding animations, visuals and notifications. Testing is a key part of our development process, so when we started developing the application one of the first steps was…

January 19, 2015 Shutl

The Zombie Apocalypse Retrospective!

I’ve written extensively in the past that I believe that retrospectives should be a creative process and I like to engage the brain using interesting visuals and ideas. I’ve attempted to employ this philosophy at Shutl by trying to use a different theme for every retrospective I’ve run (a recent example of one I found through…

November 24, 2014 Culture, Shutl

Developer Anarchy Day

Have you ever imagined what would happen if you let software developers work on what they want? Well, we did it. For one day. And here is what happened… How it all began “OK, listen: there is no backlog today.” When we first heard these words from Megan instead of the usual beginning of standup, we…