TechLead-Story: Matthias Posch, CTO at tubics

Matthias Posch

2 min read

Team

Size and Roles:

Current team size: 5 members, including a Team Lead, 2 Frontend Devs, and 2 Backend Devs (one of whom also functions as a Sysadmin).
Cross-functional roles: Frontend and Backend developers occasionally overlap in responsibilities.

Organization and Methodology:

"tubics-scrumban" methodology: Adapted approach combining elements from various methodologies, emphasizing flexibility.
Practices include 2-week sprints, Sprint Planning Meetings with Story Points estimation, Sprint Retrospectives, Pair Programming, Pull Requests, and Peer Reviews.
Agile and adaptive to changes, allowing a minimal set of committed tickets with a large buffer for flexibility during sprints.
Product Team focuses on future features and strategic product direction, translating into abstract User Stories for detailed specification by the Dev Team.

Distinctive Team Aspects:

Strength lies in adapting established development models and theories to the unique team situation.
Emphasis on understanding personal strengths and weaknesses, fostering an environment of learning from one another.
Approach to errors involves root cause analysis without pointing fingers, treating code as a collaborative effort to improve the product and the team as a whole.

Integration in Recruiting Process:

Onboarding Procedure:

Extensive onboarding meeting on the first day with the Team Lead to set up accounts, access, and local development environment.
Introduction to development methods, JIRA workflow, and immediate involvement in coding with a first User Story.
Integration into the team's daily tasks, meetings, and responsibilities from day one.
Initial focus on 1-on-1 discussions in the first weeks, along with welcoming new members with a celebratory after-work beer.

Qualities Beyond Technical Skills:

Team fit and work attitude considered equally important as technical skills.
Ability to independently adapt to new environments, introduce personal principles to the codebase without disrupting existing code, and handle constructive feedback.
Critical problem-solving skills, including the ability to break down complex issues into manageable solutions, balanced with seeking help when needed.

Technical Challenges:

Dependency on the YouTube API as the primary data source presents challenges and restrictions that require creative solutions.

Technologies in Use:

Angular, Node.js, ExpressJS, TypeScript, MySQL, Docker, Cypress, and third-party APIs.

Evolution of Technology:

Core structure of the application has remained consistent since the beginning.
Adoption of Microservices architecture over time.
Backend hosting transitioned from Heroku to Google Cloud Platform with Docker Swarm due to cost considerations.
Maturation of the product led to increased investment in logging and error handling.