What does the interview look like?
During a typical interview, we will first talk about what we do, why we do it, and how it all started. Next, we will ask you about your experience and we will try to get to know you a bit better. We do not give any tasks during the interview itself; no whiteboard math is […]
Community management… what’s the point?
Achieving technical excellence is the vision of our tech team. I truly believe that what we do here and how we go about it brings us one step closer to this goal every day. But how can we measure it? Not an easy task, but one thing that can help is external feedback. We as […]
We’re all capable of doing good, so let’s do it right
“Everyone can help – not everyone realizes it, though.” Here, I’m quoting myself, Community Manager at Mews. Not because I believe there’s no one more suitable than myself to quote, but because I’ve been able to contribute to the common good as part of my current role, and I’d like to take the opportunity to […]
How has Mews made me a better developer (even before I joined)
“Well, this is interesting!” I silently uttered to myself as I was digging deeper into a topic that now, after the experience, I think anybody who’s serious about software development should learn. Yet, if it wasn’t for my interview at Mews, which incentivized me and inspired me to learn the topic, I probably wouldn’t learn […]
Beaches, Beers, Archaeology, and Changing Careers at 30
If you’re living in Prague and you know an American, they most likely came over to teach English. However, not many of them stick with it for too long, and that’s the story for Tim. Surprisingly, after his short-lived English teaching career, Tim’s passion for archaeology got him interested in programming and computers in general. […]
Work Remotely Like a Pro: Digital nomading your post-pandemic life
When I had the idea to write this blog post, my main mission was to show that working remotely is something that no one should be afraid of, and I want to share some tips and tricks that I have learned throughout the last 6 years of doing it myself. This is not by any […]
Employed-preneur
Recently I celebrated a personal milestone—not only was it my first anniversary with Mews, but also my first anniversary of being an employee. You got that right. I was hired for my first job at 30-years-old. It was our trip to Iceland when Mews arranged our first interview Previously, I was an entrepreneur, running a […]
Standa: fan of Bob Dylan, algorithmic randomness, and Calvin Coolidge
The 30th US president, Calvin Coolidge, was known to be a man of few words. Luckily, that wasn’t the case with Standa during our interview. We covered everything from the hard life of a PhD student and changing musical taste to a recently developed passion for road bikes. Standa gave us some tips about where […]
Code & Tell
Your own colleagues are your most important community. That’s how I see the role of the Community Manager in a technological company. Of course, you need to make sure that the developers talk at conferences, meetups and that they write blog posts. Simply sharing their knowledge and experience. However, even this needs to be done […]
Science in hospitality? Talk to these guys…
Welcome to the second edition of Meet Mews Partner Devs, this time with the guys behind Pace who aren’t just “anyone”. A couple of years ago, when we created an open API for anyone to integrate with our application, Pace helped to shape it, and we’ve seen them grow and push the limits of hospitality […]
Connecting devs & product: Key lessons learned
In early 2020 we decided to kick off a series of events bringing insights from engineering leaders at Czech tech scaleups (as we like to call companies already past the initial startup phase). Up to now, we have organized three TechUncovered panel discussions. The previous two events focused on scaling tech teams and leading tech […]
TechUncovered: Connecting devs & product
TechUncovered series aims to bring the Prague tech community insights from engineering leaders of tech companies that already passed the initial startup phase. Topics: Connecting devs & product – focus, roadmaps, team engagement, cooperation, planning & grooming, and much more. Moderator: Lukáš Putna, CTO at Heureka Group Panelists: Marián Kamenišťák , VP of Engineering at […]
A different kind of Magic Mike: From hostel reception to teaching coding
Yet another extraordinary life is about to be revealed in our interview series: this time it’s Mike, our QA whiz. Before he turned his life around by finding bugs and making our system better, he gained experience in hospitality by working in hostels and Mews’ customer care. If you’re not afraid of deep conversations, he’s […]
Programmer’s Best Friend: The Mechanical Keyboard
Other professionals use professional tools, yet we spend our whole day in front of a $5 rubber dome keyboard. Investing in a nice mouse for gaming or productivity is nothing new, so why are keyboards neglected? It is the single most touched item of developers (especially Linux nerds with tiling window managers), might as well […]
Joshua, veteran developer who can fix your vintage synthesizer
Fans of our blog already know the Meet MewsDevs interview series where we bring you the extraordinary lives of the people behind our technology. But why stop there? Thanks to our open API the Mews ecosystem is full of interesting companies and tech people behind them. That’s why you’re reading the first Meet Mews Partner […]
Learning is good: no matter if it’s management, piano or F#
I was really looking forward to interviewing Pepa one day. I had observed him for months, almost like David Attenborough observes emperor penguins mating in Antarctica. And, indeed, he is a unique species. Talking to him, you wouldn’t think that he was born after the Czech hockey team won the gold medal at the Nagano […]
Marketa, linguist who found love in SQL and Portugal
Marketa’s first contact with Mews? A rejection email. More than a year later? She’s talking to me for the fifth Meet MewsDevs interview. It was a real pleasure to do this one (again, long distance) because how often do you see a transformation from linguist to data analyst? Not too often… and when you add […]
Amsterdam: the city of… .NET talks
The fear I hate flying. Even though it’s said to be the safest method of transportation, my fear of heights, fear of speed, and claustrophobia don’t really make it feel that way. And if something goes wrong, you’re doomed. Sooner or later, everybody found out about me and flying. Some were a bit surprised, especially […]
Birds, commuting, and Flutter — that’s our App Guy!
Who do we have this time for the fourth edition of Meet MewsDev interview? The Head of Application Development (or, simply, App Guy) Kirill and QA Engineer Natalia (Tasha) have been married for six years and are truly inseparable. Tasha chose not to be the main star of this piece, but during the interview it […]
Scaling tech teams: Key lessons learned
The very first TechUncovered event focused on the challenges of building and scaling engineering teams, career development, and maturing processes. Scaling tech teams is not a simple task, it’s tough work. As we witness the Prague startup scene constantly growing and getting more and more into the scaleup stage, we decided to bring together some […]
Classic cliché: computer nerds. If you thought they were extinct, think again….
For the first time in the short history of the Meet MewsDevs interview series, I decided it would be a good idea to interview two people at once. Alexander (frontend dev) and Vaclav (backend dev) have a lot in common. They both study at Charles University Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (Matfyz), live in the […]
Lunch Automation for Developers: The Story of Kebab Wars
In Mews we often use phrases like bring hotels to the 21st century or join the revolution of the hospitality industry. One of our T-shirts has the catchphrase Automate this!. What differentiates Mews from most other companies is the way we truly mean what we say. Even internally. Hell, mostly internally. We often automate even […]
Automated zero-downtime migrations
Mews is used by hotels all over the world in various time zones leaving us with no room for maintenance downtime. This fact and our aim for continuous deployment left us no other choice than zero downtime deployments, as having even short outages is obviously not an option. However, these non-breaking migrations are executed manually […]
MIT Future Compute 2019
I’m gonna tell you a story,I’m gonna tell you about my townI’m gonna tell you a big fat story, babyAw, it’s all about my town <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcq7FaZSQbQ”>The best Boston song of all time</a> I have always been fascinated by MIT and the values it represents. This dates back to my computer science undergraduate years where […]
Meet the MewsDevs – Daria
The second edition of Meet the MewsDevs is here! After Backend dev (and DOTA lover) Jarda, it’s time for Daria and the story of one Russian’s struggle to buy sunflower seeds in Prague and going from chemical engineer to Frontend developer at Mews. Hey, Daria, you’ve been with us for about 2 years, right? No, […]
Path to Continuous Deployment
As our company and (especially) tech teams grow, our need for better deployment processes increases too. We started with tedious, manual tasks and through a process of continuous improvement over the course of the past 6 years, reached full automation. Watch the talk I gave at ReactiveConf about how we have achieved it: You can […]
Mews Challenge
At the latest WebExpo conference we had a mini-game in our booth (or 2 mini-games to be precise – tests for designers and developers). The candidate selects one right answer per question and had only one attempt to pass the test. The ranking was done by the number of correct answers and by the time […]
Meet the MewsDevs – Jarda
Over the years working closely with our development team I’ve realized that I am surrounded by people with such random and extraordinary natures that it would be a shame if we didn’t tell the world about them. You are reading the first piece of what we envision as a series of Meet the MewsDevs interviews. […]
Mews, ČVUT, Stanford and coding
Students first “Today’s students are tomorrow’s future”. How cheesy is this classic statement? Very. However, the core is true and we borrowed the sentence and applied a couple of modifications to define what it means to us at Mews: “Students are Mews’ past, present and future” – because the “founding fathers” of the tech team […]
Monitoring office conditions
The problem Some time ago I noticed that the air in our office gets stale in the evening. After a few minutes of googling I came to the conclusion that the problem might be a high concentration of CO2. The problem with working at high CO2 levels is that you cannot concentrate well and you […]
Our trip to droidCon Berlin 2019
DroidCon Berlin is the Europe’s biggest Android event (held yearly), that draws in mobile development enthusiasts and experts from all over the world. The format is mostly 20-45 minutes talks, or 40 minutes plenary sessions. There are 5 talks held in the same time in different auditoriums. The talks are about everything Android and mobile […]
Sideproject Story: Building Face Authentication in Lisbon
The problem Typing in username and password every time you want to access the system can be tiresome. Ideally, you want to use some password manager. At Mews, we love 1Password! And we wish also our clients would use a similar solution. Unfortunately, we have noticed there are cases of freely accessible unlocked systems in […]
Building a healthy tech team
Mews has grown tremendously over the last couple of months. This time last year the team consisted of 80 people while today we are at 230 (40 are in the tech team, 20 of those hired since January). Of course, we’re not the first nor last company to experience this growth but it’s still pretty […]
Our first hackathon: How did it go?
At Mews, we spend a lot of effort to make our APIs well documented and easily integratable with other solutions. On Friday, we wanted to test it against chatbot implementations, so we gathered a group of developers and technological enthusiasts and challenged them to build chatbots on top of our platform. We have partnered with […]
Into Hospitality’s Future with Chatbots
February 8th, 2019 Microsoft, Vyskočilova 1561/4a, 140 00 Praha 4 We’d like you to invite you to our hackathon! Let’s join forces and come up with some great chatbots for the hospitality industry. We have Azure Bot Service and the Mews property management system right at our fingertips. Not to mention, we’ve invited the team […]
