Haulio is a technology startup founded in 2017 which aims to provide the simplest and most reliable way for businesses to get their containers moved. Yes, we are talking about the physical containers here not the Docker containers.
In Haulio, we ask our employees to give their best in work, and we’re committed to doing the same. It’s why we offer great opportunities to empower each of us in the team.
Maximizing Engineering Velocity
As a startup, it’s crucial for us to focus on getting a high-quality product to market quickly. Hence, we have been putting in a lot of efforts to organize our System Development Team in Haulio.
Developing products for B2B business like Haulio is challenging in the sense that making fatal technology decisions need to be avoided in all cost. Hence, in the early stage of Haulio, we hire seniors who are very self-directed, which allows me as the team lead to spend time on other stuff.
Since Haulio is still very young, engineers in Haulio are able to contribute their ideas to the product development and their decisions all have a profound long-term impact on the company. Every week, after our CPO’s discussion with product designers and UX researchers, he will approach our engineers to spend many hours in discussions about our data model, architecture, timeline, and implementation approach.
Organized Product Development Stages
With Azure DevOps, the System Development Team is able to work on rapid product development and deployment in a well managed manner. The DevOps process in the cloud lets us release and iterate quickly, even several times a day with the help of continuous deployment.
In the early stage of a user story or bug, we will have a discussion about the story points and areas before we assign the tasks to the engineers. After the feature is done or the bug is fixed, a pull request will be created and then it will go through code review process which is done by our senior engineers. Once the pull request is approved, the staging server will automatically be updated with the latest changes. Our Product Team and QA Team will then join the testing process before the changes are deployed.
We host all our projects on Azure DevOps so that all our engineers can easily contribute to the projects. With just a team of seven full-time engineers and one intern across two countries, last year we celebrated the 1,000 pull requests. This shows a successful cumulative effort by a cross-nation team of engineers.
Applying New Knowledge
In June 2018, Microsoft announced that .NET Core 2.0 would soon reach its end of life in October 2018. As Haulio products are built using .NET Core 2.0 framework, our System Development Team react to the issue quickly by first learning the new frameworks such as .NET Core 2.1 and 2.2. Then after a few months, we successfully migrated all our codes to be using .NET Core 2.1 with almost no downtime to our online systems.
In December 2018, our team also made use of Pusher and Handsontable to build a cloud-connected spreadsheet right in our system to enable our accountants to easily collaborate with each other. After the project is done, we’re so exciting that we actually did a small Google Spreadsheet alike product.
One of the ways we keep our team members to always stay up to date is through a culture called Continuous Learning Culture.
Continuous Learning Culture and Buddy System
We are firm believers of self learning and knowledge sharing. Hence, in the team, we have this continuous learning culture that we share knowledge with each other frequently through many channels.
On Microsoft Teams, we have a channel called “System Development Knowledge Sharing” dedicated for this continuous learning culture.
Beside this, we also have a Buddy System where we help each other, especially seniors helping juniors and university interns to catch up by guiding them in learning new technology skills. Hence, unlike most of the companies, our interns actually have the chance to get their hands dirty to build something real for our business.
Networking and Talks
In the System Development Team of Haulio, we can attend or help organize technical sharing sessions. As a startup supporting by Microsoft BizSpark, we make use of Microsoft technologies to drive our business. Thus, the technical talks we organize are mainly related to .NET and Azure technology.
During the sessions, we also encourage our fellow engineers to network with other technical professionals by exchanging their ideas during the events. This is one of my favorite perks because the topics discussed are always very interesting, compelling, and eye-opening.
Contributing to Development of World-Class System
As a startup, Haulio is a place where each of us has loads of responsibilities and we are able to work on many different types of projects. This means that there will be tons of opportunities for learning and growth abound. Founders and employees work together; there’s no middle management, so we learn from the best.
The whole team share in the birth, growth, and success of the company. Everyone of us wants to belong to something big, something special, and most importantly, something useful to the society. Hence, we all have the pride in our work.
Caring and Love
Since most of us are young and on average we are only 29 years old, we not only work closely with each other, but also help each other outside of the work.
In order to promote healthy lifestyle, almost every month we have outing in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even Myanmar! So, we work hard and we play hard.
Join Us!
If you would like to find out more about the our System Development Team, please pay us a visit at PSA Unboxed or visit our homepage at haulio.io.
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