According to Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim’s Accelerate, a generative culture and team experimentation predict software delivery and organizational performance. Generative culture relies less on hierarchy and power and focuses more on performance and trust. What do generative culture and team experimentation have in common? They both rely on a community of highly-skilled … Continue reading What is Our Culture, and What Do We Want it to be?
Author: inrhaf
CI/CD is Every Engineer’s Job. Yes, Even Yours!
Picture this: the project that you’ve spent a long time working on, put in the hard hours for, and poured your soul into just releasing a new build. Sweet! But now a developer on the project pushed a brand new change and it’s your responsibility to determine if this change is good enough to be … Continue reading CI/CD is Every Engineer’s Job. Yes, Even Yours!
Rise of the Machines
Using GPT to accelerate Software Development Source The Nature of the Beast Ah, the rise of the machines! We're not talking about a Terminator-style takeover but rather the incredible potential of GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) in software development. Think of GPTs as autocomplete on steroids; it's all about finding the sweet spot in its vast … Continue reading Rise of the Machines
SwiftUI Button Styles
The engineering community here at WillowTree, especially within the iOS practice, has been super excited about SwiftUI. It’s incredible how much power and flexibility it brings to our app development workflows. This blog post was created in conjunction with Will Ellis, who gave a wonderful talk showcasing the power of SwiftUI Button Styles. You can … Continue reading SwiftUI Button Styles
How to Explain Technical Things to People: Two Tools
Making technology understandable for any audience is why I first got into software testing and UX design. After having spent three decades learning how to explain technical things to people across a wide range of demographics, I’ve noticed this is an underdeveloped skill in our industry. It should be taught and emphasized so much more … Continue reading How to Explain Technical Things to People: Two Tools
Backend Performance Testing & Capacity Planning
Backend Performance Testing & Capacity Planning Why Should I? Imagine for a moment that you’ve been working tirelessly for months on a shiny new product with killer features. This one product alone will drive a 20% revenue bump in the year following launch. You’ve written maintainable code, great unit tests, and have an automated deploy … Continue reading Backend Performance Testing & Capacity Planning
The Culture of an Agency: A New Role
WillowTree is an organization that has absolutely exploded with growth over the last 7 years, since I started here as an intern in 2016. At the time, we were at about 150 people in the entire company, and now we're eclipsing 1,300. With this growth has obviously come change. Information is harder to disseminate, and … Continue reading The Culture of an Agency: A New Role
How to Use Swift Snapshot Testing for XCUITest
Swift Snapshot Testing is a wonderful open source library that provides support for snapshot tests in your swift code. Its snapshot comparison options are robust, supporting UIImages, JSON, ViewControllers, and more. Originally developed with unit tests in mind, this tool is easily extended to support comparisons of XCUIElements in UI tests as well. This allows … Continue reading How to Use Swift Snapshot Testing for XCUITest
Switching Roles: From Test Engineer to Software Engineer
It’s a regular weekday afternoon and I’m sitting at my desk in the WillowTree Durham office. I’m enjoying some fancy dark chocolate peanut butter cups from the kitchen while working on my current React Native project. I’m a software engineer (SE). If you’re reading this, you might be wondering how I got here. I started … Continue reading Switching Roles: From Test Engineer to Software Engineer
What even is Staff Engineering? A Series
One of the biggest reasons the title of “Staff Engineer” is so hard to wrap up in one quick explanation is because it entails such a wide scope.