Tes engineering blog

Back in September 2019 we decided to host a Global Day of Coderetreat event. Since we’re a remote first digital education company, this event would also be conducted remotely. The event would be globally available and would include people inside and outside of TES. A few questions you may have 🤷🏽‍♀️ What is a Coderetreat? Originated at the Codemash Conference in January 2009 by Gary Bernhardt, Patrick Welsh, Nayan Hajratwala and Corey Haines.

At Tes, we use superagent as our standard request library.

Three years ago, a review of our codebase showed that we had six different request libraries in use on the client side across our different services: superagent, isomorphic-fetch, browser-request, whatwg-fetch, reqwest, and axios.

Engineers had a discussion to try to find a single library to meet all our needs.

I joined TES 3 months ago and in that time have been reflecting on some things I have learnt - raising good PRs is one of them. My prior experience is using trunk based development, where everyone on the team commits to the master branch. I work in the Security Engineering team now and we use PRs a lot, which was new for me. One of our responsibilities in the team is to look after the AAA services.

At Tes we have a weekly knowledge sharing session. As part of this, Rouan recently shared some tips for how to get started with contributing to open source projects. Turns out, it’s easier than you might have thought. Even better, you can probably do it as part of your daily work! In his presentation Rouan also explores reasons for contributing to open source and gives examples for how he got started.

My colleague, Federico, and I have done a lot of pair-programming recently - remotely, of course. He’s in Milan and I was working between the UK, Germany and Singapore. We tried several different tools, so I thought I’d write a review of our experience.

Here’s a real life tale of how we used Application Monitoring, Observability and Graceful Degradation to be able to ship fast but also catch and fix mistakes without letting our users down.

In it we take a look at safe failure states and complementing metrics with supporting data and how we use them to solve real issues.

Looking for a library that helps you to serve up dynamic forms based on your own schemas? Tes engineers recently open-sourced rolling-fields, a simple library that dynamically generates fields for your form on-the-fly.

Observing what happens when your users interact with your software keep you from disaster, allowing your users to keep working and you to keep shipping. At Tes we capture what happens when our users interact with our services. We set expectations on outcomes. This means we know when our users can’t reach their goals. It also means we can act fast to fix problems. In this blog post I’ll show how alerts help with this and how we make this a team-focused activity.

This May I was lucky enough to attend the J on the Beach conference, in Marbella, Spain. The event is able to (just about truthfully) advertise itself as ‘on the beach’, but given the proliferation of ‘data’ and ‘DevOps’ conferences, did it stand out? Did it succeed in its aim of unifying us all around Big Data? And, most importantly, what does the ‘J’ stand for?