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How our engineering team improves the on-call experience with Tines

At Tines, we have two types of on-call: daytime and out-of-hours. In this blog, we explain the daytime on-call shift, its pros and cons, and how we make it easier by using Tines.

5 lessons learned during my first year as a graduate software engineer

As her first year as a graduate software engineer comes to an end, Izabela shares her top five lessons learned that give an insight into life at Tines and tips for new software engineer graduates.

Building a simple dynamic job scheduler with Sidekiq

Every incident presents an opportunity, and here we examine why we replaced our old scheduler with something more reliable.

A remote day in the life of a junior engineer

While other software companies are returning to offices, Tines is continuing with its contemporary approach to the workday - all engineering positions are optionally remote. Here’s what my typical day looks like.

Sponsoring the Lezer parser system

We’re delighted to announce that we have recently begun sponsoring the excellent Lezer parser system from the codemirror team.

The curious engineer

A frequent, valid objection to the concept of a "full-stack" engineer is that there is just too much to know.

Engineering management at Tines

Things have been changing on the engineering team at Tines. With the team continuing to grow in size, we’re getting to the point where we have too many people to treat ourselves as one team with one manager. So, we need to introduce a new role on our team - Engineering Manager.

Understanding why our build got 15x slower with Webpack 5

A while back, we encountered an odd problem. All of a sudden, building our front-end went from taking a few seconds to taking a few minutes. We felt this most acutely when starting our front-end development server.

10 things I learned in my first year as a software engineer

After just over a year in the industry, I wanted to reflect on my experience and the things I learned that helped me on my continuous journey to becoming an effective Software Engineer.

How to pass our interview

A while back, we talked about the coding exercise that forms part of our hiring process and what we're looking for when reviewing submissions. If a candidate's submission is successful, the next stages of our process involve them talking to our engineering team about their experiences, and pairing with them to add features to their submission.

GraphQL powered RESTful API

We sought to unify the access path for both the REST API and the Web app. We found that the best way to do this was to use the existing GraphQL API implementation to power both the Web App and the REST API. This is how we did it.

Software engineering metaphors

Metaphors and similes are some of the most powerful tools for thinking available to us as software engineers. They allow us to apply intuition we’ve developed in one domain to another.

Relay: Fetching data in parallel with multiple queries

Relay is a JavaScript framework for fetching and updating GraphQL data in React. This is achieved by declaring the data requirements on a per-component basis while Relay takes care of optimising data fetching and performance.

Simple, zero-downtime deploys with nginx and docker-compose

Even when you’re told it won’t work, always try the simple thing first. Surprisingly often, it’s enough.

How to pass our coding exercise

There are lots of different approaches that companies use to evaluate whether a candidate is the right person for a role. At Tines, we want to make sure our process shows us how candidates would perform when doing the actual work...

Using backend factories during frontend testing

When constructing end-to-end tests for web applications there are many areas which can prove problematic and can discourage users from committing to writing them at all. One of those areas is setting up the system with test data.

Our approach to CSS and how we chose it

Recently at Tines, we found ourselves with something of an “evolutionary” approach to CSS. That is to say that while we certainly had CSS and that CSS certainly worked, there didn’t seem to be any master plan...

Going off the Rails

There's nothing quite as exciting, a moment filled with as much potential, as running rails new ... for a project. The early progress is always so spectacular - a CRUDy MVC application comes together so quickly.