The past few weeks have been crazy and exciting. I’ve climbed out of the washing machine for some air, so it’s time for an update on what we’ve been building.
I started working at a new company about two months ago. Well, the company isn’t new, they’ve been around for some time, but I’m new to the company. We do Health and Safety Management.
In a nutshell, we have software that helps companies manage their people, processes and paperwork. There are lots of regulations, policies and procedures (and a bunch of other scary administrative words) that need to be followed to keep Big Brother happy. And so a system was built to help them manage all that.
The system is quite old though and the cracks are starting to show. Things don’t work as well as they should, and it’s not just a quick fix. The foundation is crumbly. Big systems like this tend to run away after a few years, especially if they weren’t built with the large scale in mind.
So six months ago they started building a brand new system.
And two months ago I joined the development team.
And today we launched phase one 🚀.
Screenshots at the end.
We’ve written a lot of code over the past few weeks. Check out the graph below. It shows additions to the code-base since the project was started. We all jumped on board in the middle of February and we took about two weeks to adjust. Once we were comfortable with the workflow things really started to pick up.
Code additions to our project
The project is pretty big. We broke it down into nice bite-sized pieces that we call features. Each developer gets one or two features to work on at a time. When we’re done with a feature we send it to the master project and it gets slotted in. This requires a bit of communication to make sure that our features play nicely together and don’t cause any conflict. Sometimes they clash, but it usually doesn’t take more than a few minutes to resolve.
Progress often feels slow when you’re programming on your own. It’s easy to lose sight of how much you’ve done. But working in a team is different: there are other developers. A couple times a week I’ll sync with the master project, and all of a sudden there’s a new feature that wasn’t there before, containing hundreds of lines of code that I didn’t have to write. And even though I didn’t write it, it feels just as satisfying seeing it there. And I’m really relieved I didn’t have to code all that on my own. Collaboration is awesome (when done right).
“Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.” - author unknown
It definitely has its stressful days. It feels high-octane. A casual observer would see me sitting at my desk banging away at my keyboard. To me, that was a crazy day. We have regular stand-ups which go a long way to keeping us motivated and on track.
Talking about being on track, did I mention that we just launched phase one?
Thanks for asking.
They’re kind of like versions. It’s what the higher-ups decided to call it.
The first phase contains the project’s core features - things that future additions to the system will build on. It also contains functionality that most people won’t notice or care about but is crucial for us developers.
The next phase is arguably even more important. Our system is in the wild and we need to observe how it behaves around users. Then we’ll adjust accordingly. We’ll also be using this second phase to add things that didn’t make the cut for the first one - things that are important but not quite at the core.
There are a couple more phases thereafter. I’m excited about these phases because we’ll have something that we don’t have now: data. Then we can take the system to a whole new level.
It’s great being part of something big and momentous. It’s even greater being part of a team that is passionate about what they’re doing. We’re not just building things that work, we’re making them look awesome and feel great. We’re writing a system that we want to use. Our heads are swimming with ideas and we just can’t type fast enough to get all of it on to the screen.
Written in April 2020
Hi guys, thanks for reading! This is a teeny tiny visual taste of what it all looks like. Just a few of the top-most pages.
Login Page
A dashboard showing system stats
Employee feature
Checklists feature
Risk Assessments feature
File explorer
Incident and injury management
