Tes engineering blog

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.

If you want to be confident that your users are able to achieve their goals using your service there’s more to do than monitoring the health of individual microservices. You need assurance that your set of microservices are working well together, and when they aren’t, you need the information necessary to fix any problems as soon as you can. This blog follows one Tes team’s mission to better identify and diagnose problems, enabling them to move fast and ship with confidence.

A friend of mine tells a great story of a team avoiding a great deal of grief. All of their system health checks were green, but the live graph of purchases dropped to zero and stayed there. Despite the many positive system indicators, the team were able to see they had a problem and were able able to react quickly to find and to fix it. It turned out that user purchases was a key indicator of success.