Tes engineering blog

You’ve all heard the old adage: There’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team’. Teamwork would be much easier if we were working with clones! But we are all unique so we have to find a way to figure out how to work with other people who don’t think like us. Remember, we travelled different paths to reach the current point in our career and picked up different skills along the way. Often these differences are what help us to come up with creative solutions.

Our working culture at Tes emphasises a “remote first” approach. This means that any team member can work from any location. It’s awesome and it allows us to work with lots of lovely colleagues based around the world. It also means that if you want to go off and travel while working, you can go - no questions asked. Or if you want to come to our London office every day, that’s totally fine too.

The Tes engineering team could be seen as a managerless engineering team. It’s better described as an engineering team where the management responsibilities are shared across the team. If you’re wondering how this works, sit down and I’ll paint a picture.

The fact is, it’s just easier to work remotely with people you’ve met in so-called “real-life” - folks you’ve shared laughs and meals with.[^1]

One of the best things about working on a remote team is getting together in real life. Tes Engineering Week happens once a year in October. This year was the second edition after a successful trial in 2017.

Individual teams get together fairly frequently; however Engineering Week is one week in the year when all the engineers come together to bond. This is a significant investment of time and money for Tes but is worth it for both the shared experiences and trust that is established during the week.

Exploiting known vulnerabilities is still the number one way attackers compromise a system and is on the OWASP list of the Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks, so we’ve made automated vulnerability checking an important part of our development flow here at Tes. We’ve been using nsp, a neat little command line tool from the Node Security Platform (NSP), to find known vulnerabilities. All good things come to an end The NSP was recently acquired by npm and has just been shut down.

Imagine discovering your house had subtly changed every time you came home. The cupboard doors open different ways. The light-switches control different lights, and the hot and cold taps in your kitchen swap places. The inconsistency would be maddening – and the same goes for apps and websites. Creating a consistent UI keeps your users sane and orientated. For any product where there are multiple developers, the ideal solution is a shared set of common elements and styles, but this is not simple to achieve.

Tired of your commits taking >10 seconds? Give this a bash. Linting is great, but no one likes slow commits! At Tes, we use husky to run code when the git precommit hook triggers. Most often, we run npm run lint so that we can catch linting errors before they’re even committed. (We use ESLint for linting.) The problem is that, even when you’re developing microservices, it could take quite a while to lint all the files in your repository.

A few days before International Women’s Day, Tes hosted the Ladies of Code Meetup group for an evening of talks, networking and community. Three speakers gave advice on how to become a ‘next-level developer’: how to advance your career, become a ‘superhero’ and negotiate your salary effectively in the context of the gender pay gap. While the event was aimed at women, there was sound advice for engineers of any gender.