100 days at Bestmile

I’ve done this kind of flashback for my last 2 software engineering jobs at ELCA/SecuTix and Doodle, so I’m maintaining the tradition. Albeit with a 4 weeks procrastination delay, as my 100^th day at Bestmile was end of May.

Again, here’s a list of random thoughts:

• I started working at BestMile and now work at Bestmile. A small rebranding happened, the difference is very subtle in the brand name, but we have a much improved corporate website.
• I mainly chose to work at Bestmile because of the (vision of the) product and the tech stack. So far, I’m not disappointed. I learned a lot about React, Redux, ES6, git rebase, Semantic UI, Docker. On the product side, well, we are still looking for big customers.
• Last time I was looking for a job, I turned down a position last-minute at Liip in Zurich because they paid less than the position I accepted at Doodle. Which was also offering significantly less than my previous job. This time, I chose to put less weight on the salary expectations, but still have a non-negociable lower threshold. Bestmile barely fits that.

• Since I joined, the company hired almost a dozen people. I’m a bit scared by the fast growth, but I guess we need a substantial investment into the sales team to get a chance at being sustainable.
• Bestmile is a startup because it’s still mainly financed by investors, and the product is not yet clearly defined. It is not a startup however if you look at the size and the internal organisation of the company.
• Being back on the EPFL campus is weird. My freshman and sophomore years were the shittiest time of my life, and I don’t particularly like being reminded of them.
• The EPFL campus sure has changed a lot since I graduated in 2004.^[1]

• I used to think I was a keyboard geek because I was using my own personal keyboard with a US layout. But this is nothing compared to some of my current colleagues’ setup.
• Bestmile is the first company I work at that has QA engineers who write end-to-end tests themselves and approve features instead of the product owner.
• I’m allowed to work remotely 1 day per week. I usually don’t do it because I live close to the office, and I need to get out of my apartment.
• In Zurich, I was walking to work because I lived so close to the office. Now I’m biking again, which is awesome. 20–30 minutes of free daily exercise.
• We’re supposed to work 42.5h/week. During most of my “career” I worked 42h/week, then at Doodle we went down to 40h/week.
• The team is diverse in terms of age (I’m not the oldest dev anymore) and origin. At the office in Lausanne, we have people from Switzerland (with a bunch of binationals), France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Iran, Canada, etc. English skills naturally vary a lot, and they are overall a bit worse than at Doodle. We are also, sadly, mostly men.
• I got the chance to set up a whole new app from scratch. I set the unit test coverage threshold at 80% and for now we have been able to keep it there.
• Overall I’m happy with what I do. I’ve been working a bit too much on boring CRUD screens though.
• I do a lot less actual UI crafting than before, and I miss it a bit. The only new concept I barely touched upon are CSS grids. Our app is targeted at Chrome only, with no intention to have a responsive design. Both are bad decisions we are very well aware of, but we do our best not to paint ourself into a corner.
• Like when I started at Doodle, there is currently no designer at Bestmile. But we are looking for one.
• Other things I got to play with a little: GTFS, Websockets, Looker, map projections^[2], dial-a-ride problem…
• It’s a bit weird to go from millions of users overall and thousands of concurrent users at Doodle, to virtually no user at all at Bestmile.
• Our scrum process is still in the making. The goal is to have 2 weeks sprints culminating in a production release. So far, the system has not been stable enough, so nothing was ever released.