Glovo Culture of Tech Innovation
Tech at Glovo continues to grow as we keep hiring incredible talent from all around the world. To stay innovative inside the tech industry…
Glovo Culture of Tech Innovation
Tech at Glovo continues to grow as we keep hiring incredible talent from all around the world. To stay innovative inside the tech industry, we need to share knowledge and inspiration within the teams. We need to break up silos, foster communication, generate trust and improve future working collaborations.
Regardless of discipline, cluster, function, or location, we need to bring all our talented teams together, give them autonomy, and spark their creativity. This is not an easy task but we try to build a collaborative environment to make sure it will happen through various different events and schemes.
Lightning talks
Lightning Talks are short informal sessions about any interesting technical topic. Anyone in the tech team is welcome to give a talk. These talks are also a great opportunity to know each other in a company that keeps growing fast.
There is only one rule to lightning talks: They should last no more than 15 minutes (excluding questions, which get their 5 extra minutes). The format is free: you can use a presentation, a game, or present your ideas with drawings.
Some examples of recent talks are:
- Vue Composition API
- Vue Virtual Dom
- Multi Arm Bandits
- Indestructible: How to stay focused in a remote organization
- Automating microservices management with Kubernetes and Terraform
- How Docker Works 101?
- Measuring Web Performance
As you can see the topics can be very diverse but extremely interesting. The talks are recorded so you can watch them at your own pace.
Committees
The committee (also known as board or guild in other companies) is the gathering of people with the same capability across the company to exchange opinions and resolve common problems. Some of the Glovo committees are Front end, Back end, Security, Observability, Interviews, Mobile, and more.
For example, the goals of the Front end Committee that I’m part of are the following:
- Improve and align the processes and outcomes of all the Front end engineering in Glovo.
- Make Glovo a place where engineers want to come to work and learn and become better developers.
- Become a state-of-the-art example of code quality, department-wide collaboration, and developer productivity recognized amongst all the Front end engineering spectrum.
We meet every 2 weeks and it’s one of the meetings that I’m really looking forward to.
Make Glovo a place where engineers want to work, learn and become better developers.
Back to School Fridays
Every Friday after 3 pm we dedicate time to learn new technologies, improve our skills or try something new. This is a great opportunity to experiment and grow. The chosen topic has to be something that can help us in the current/future projects. Ideally, the outcome of this experimentation time should be shared across the company or the committee. An example of this initiative is the article you are currently reading and many more talks/articles/proof of concepts that were created during this timeslot.
Hackathons
The ultimate form of innovation and experimentation is the annual Hackathon. A 24-hour event that everyone can participate in. We recently had the 6th edition which was full of awesome ideas with some of them already on the road to production. No wonder that the core engine behind our order dispatching mechanism was once a hackathon idea.
Request for Comments (RFC)
One of the challenges faced by engineering teams as they grow is maintaining good communication. Especially with regards to the systems they own and operate in engineering. As our systems grow more complicated and larger, it will become increasingly difficult to be aware of all changes happening by other teams and we need to find a lightweight process to share out this information in a way where all engineers and teams can be notified and contribute to the change. Sometimes this can be crucial to preventing outages as one team might be wanting to do work in another domain that they are not familiar with and they need to share this information with the necessary parties so that the solution can be vetted.
The process for things like this that allowed us to establish some of the standards we know today, it’s called the RFC process. A simple document that allows for an overview of the changes being proposed and allows all parties interested to be notified and contribute to the discussion. This process allows for engineering teams to share company-wide their proposed changes and for anyone interested (stakeholder or not to participate in the outcome).
Learning budget
Glovo provides support in regards to training and learning for your job. As part of this, we sponsor our employees when going to conferences, technical skills training, events, books, and everything that will impact employee performance in the short and mid-term.
Tech Conferences
Other than being able to attend conferences with your learning budget we organize internal or public conferences to exchange knowledge and share experiences.
Engineering blog
The goal is to share as much knowledge as we can in our engineer blog, mostly because we learn a lot while doing so. You can find more articles on the Glovo engineering blog homepage.
Conclusion
This is definitely an incomplete list but sets the tone on the multiple ways innovation is embedded in Glovo culture. Every day new ideas emerge that can lead to something interesting. This is the beauty of working with a lot of autonomy, flexibility and among extremely smart people. If you want to be part of an innovative environment or just looking for a new challenge please take a look at our open positions.
Thank you and stay curious✌️
