What's it like to be a software engineer at Wanteeed ?

Fred Roumat

29 Sep 2019 • 6 min read

Morning

It's 9 am. You get off the {tramway | bike | rollerblade | scooter} and heading to the front door of the office, in the very center of Bordeaux. Some people are already here and others will arrive at 9:30, because some prefer to come and leaving early and others late.

Everyone has his own morning rhythm

After powered up your mac book and additional screen, you can ask the Lead Developer about your yesterday Pull Request or thinking about your future mission and the way you want to achieve the technical challenge.

9:30 am. If it's Monday, well, it's Breakfast Tiiiime ! Everyone in the office, including other startups is sharing a moment around tea, coffee, croissants, chocolatines, pains au raisin and almost every kind of french pastries except pains au chocolat, of course. You talk about your weekend activities with your teammates and this is also the preferred moment to make some office wide special announcements like :

AfterWork on Tuesday evening at the pub next door

Let's make a picnic with everyone tomorrow

10 am. A story is waiting for you ! This one is featuring Anne-Charlotte, our Product Manager, that noticed a little dysfunction in our extension. Our mission is to automatically try and apply the best coupon when you shop online. But guess what ?! Since yesterday, on a very popular website, extensions can't correctly apply coupons, because of the way we micmic the user behavior does not fool the website anymore since this new version !

You'll have to suggest a new workaround to get over this and allow again everyone to find the best coupon on this website.

Time is running my friend ! Chances are high that a { wife | brother | mama | sista } of a teammate is waiting for your fix before ordering their last { running shoes | makeup | videogame } on this website. Well, in fact, a million people is waiting too, but forget about it for few minutes, there is no need to put some pressure on you.

While you're working at improving online shopping experience for real people out there, Thomas, the coworker on your left, just finished to write down his strategy to tackle the current engineering team headache : How can we divide by 10 the time required by our continuous integration pipeline ?
On your right, this is Rémy, Lead Developer, who is already reading Thomas' story and he's about to approve the idea to allow him to start working on it.

The team is a distributed brain

That means we split the everyday complexity into problems that each one is focusing on solving his own. You can be creative, try things and suggest unplanned moves if you think it's a better way to reach the goal. But, as you may know, with great power comes great responsibility : we expect autonomy, trust and communication along a technical versatility.

Break

12:30, time for lunch! Being downtown is a temptation for food ! Burgers, Thai meals, Sushis, Pizza, PokeBowl or Salads are a few minutes away from the office. You can grab your preferred one and came back to eat with everyone in the kitchen.

Before 2pm, the office turns into a competition field ! There are different flavors available : FIFA 2v2 on a (seriously too) big screen, darts killer game (you thought you had friends in the office ? Think twice, not in this game) or mobile games like Clash Royal. It's up to you but you can also take a nap instead.

Afternoon

2pm : Stand-up everyone ! The technical people are gathering together in a room for ~10 minutes to synchronize themselves, helping each other and discuss about potential freeze in the roadmap. Something important to share with the team ? Your voice is expected to be heard here !

The rest of the day is dedicated to work on your current story or to give a technical point of view on the next one requested by Martin, our Data Analyst : He needs to send an analytical event when a user is closing the extension UI. Something we can use to be sure to never annoy someone.

4pm : From time to time, there is a little break in the afternoon. Yep, you guessed it : Snack time ! A few teammates already shared their cooking talents with the rest of the team : cookies, banana cakes, tiramisus, chocolate sand roses. Just a quick recipes overview of Corentin, Delphine, Martin, Gaël & family, Marie and Anne-Cha AKA "the cookers".
Some jealous people will say we have a food addiction in this team. And we'll answer.. Yeah ! But intensive brain activity needs to be fueled by something. If you don't feel concerned, well, there might be conclusions to draw.

Ceremonials

Depending of the day we are in the week or month, you could attend different team ceremonials :

Retro week, every Monday morning (after breakfast for sure)
=> Live demo of what has just been done
=> Q/A about the current Epics, upcoming challenges and hiring
=> Live expression during a team-wide post-it session to like/unlike/congrats/suggest about things happened the week before (Nicolas' preferred moment of the week)
Team Lunch, once a month
=> ~~Eating pizza~~ Team synchronization
=> Workflow improvement
=> Previous month results & achievements
Epic Kick Off, whenever needed
=> Launching a new block on the roadmap with a dedicated squad
=> Collectively agreeing with a definition of done, big steps and time (macro)estimation to achieve it
Team Building, few times a year
=> Throwing axes
=> Sailing on the Bassin d'Arcachon
=> Fighting zombies in VR
=> Celebrating the company's (and Delphine's) birthday at the Co(o)rniche, next to La Dune du Pilat

Our playground

We're big fans of JavaScript here. Since web-extensions are historically built with JS, keeping the same language for all other projects (Node.js + React.js) can add significant values :

Focus on only one language accelerates the learning curve
Different teams can share knowledge and be helped by others even if they are indifferently working on extension, backend or frontend components
Moving business logic from extension to backend is a matter of a copy/paste (already happened few times without a glitch)

Our infrastructure, hosted on Heroku + GCP, is microservice oriented and powered with modern technologies like Docker, GraphQL, Postgres, Redis and Mongo.
Our workflow is backed by GitHub, CircleCI, Selenium with Unit and Integration tests, orchestrated around a KANBAN style methodology.

We're daily dealing with technical constraints inherited from ~800K active users a month and their related traffic, millions of user transactions updated with a dozen external APIs, 30millions events a month ingested by our analytic pipeline and an international context that is about to happen.

Working at an extension based business means having to go deeper in the tech part because every single component/tool that exists in a plug and play model for the rest of the world does not work in an extension context.

We have to understand every technology used, master it and adapt it to our context

This is a hard work, but a fantastic reason to play with a lot of exciting technologies and to strongly improve our skills. No risk to get bored at work.

The result of all this tech puzzle ? In 2018, we saved 35 Millions euros to our users, one code line at a time. Pretty neat, right ?