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.
Ebay Tech London posts
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.
Ruby Virtual Machine Internals and Investigating Variable Scope
The idea of scope in any programming language is a pretty fundamental concept that – although people often struggle with it at first – quickly becomes second nature; the idea of getting tripped up by an issue with scope in a language you’ve been using for years is laughable! If you want a laugh then…
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…
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…
Is duplication always a bad thing?
tl;dr No. Well, perhaps, but it can be the lesser of two evils. It depends.
Empowering Everybody to be DevOps
The Shutl engineering team has been operating with a DevOps mentality for over two years. We started by rebuilding our infrastructure under Chef and embedding our operations engineers into our agile product development process. We made great progress and saw a big improvement in delivery and quality as all team members were responsible for getting…
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…
Hooking up Statsd, Graphite and Nagios to Create Metrics Based Alerts
At Shutl we like to move fast and deploy lots of changes. We push out new code around 70 times a week across about 15 applications. With all these changes happening we need to know quickly if something goes wrong.
Continuous Deployment with Rundeck and Chef
Here at Shutl HQ we are big fans of Chef, using it to provision our boxes from bare OS up to running application. Chef handles all of our application deployments, which happen many times a day across all of our environments. However, while Chef is excellent at managing the configuration of each machine, it is…
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…
Perspectives on Pairing: Onboarding Entry-level Engineers
I’m Nico and I joined Shutl in September 2014 after attending a 12 week programming bootcamp, before which I had no significant prior experience in developing software.