QA vs Developer mindset: The art of effective communication
Software development is a complex and dynamic process, and the key to delivering high-quality applications lies in the hands of a crucial team player: the Quality Assurance Engineer. QA engineers are responsible for ensuring that applications are reliable, efficient, and user-friendly, and they play a critical role in saving time and resources for companies. To […]
“Clean” Architecture vs pragmatic architecture
This article is based on a meetup talk I gave in January 2023. I’m working as a Staff Mobile Engineer at Mews. What staff engineers usually do differs from company to company and even department to department. In my case, it means that I do not belong to any specific team, but rather, I help […]
Microservices: Synchronous communication with gRPC
When designing microservices, developers are faced with the challenge of creating a robust, safe, yet efficient way of communicating between microservices. In this post, we are going to describe synchronous communication between microservices using gRPC, discuss highlights and challenges, and show a simple example written in .NET 6. Synchronous communication Before diving into more details […]
Writing RFCs: Our best practices and their benefits
We at Mews really like RFCs. What started more as an experiment has now become widely adopted. In the first two years, we wrote 50 RFCs(!), making it slightly more than two per month on average. This year (2022), we already see 34 of them – and there’s still a long way to go to […]
Flutter, the game engine…
Yes, you read the title right. I’ve created and shipped a game made purely in Dart and Flutter in about two months, carrying it out as a late-night coding project. Are you interested in how I made it happen? Then let’s continue. Usually, when we think about game development, crazy things like C, C++, game […]
From Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager: Before you start
Are you an individual contributor considering a career change? Do you think of management as the next step in your career? Not sure if it’s right for you? Don’t know where to start? Then read on, this article is just what you’re looking for! I’ve been in a similar situation, so let me share […]
Compile-time functional programming in TypeScript
You probably know that TypeScript is a language. But did you know that TypeScript is a language? Meaning, not the JavaScript that it transpiles to, but its actual type system? Check this out: This is TypeScript calculating Fibonacci numbers at compile-time. No JavaScript, no running the code, just the type system alone. So, how does […]
How to give your career growth a boost and unleash your resources
Investing in your career or personal growth has never been easy or straightforward, and I think many of us have faced the reality of limited resources (time, budget, head space, mentorship, etc.) when it comes to making this happen. How many times have you heard a colleague, friend, or family member complain that they are: struggling with […]
Under the hood of Mews technology in 2021
In December 2021, our tech team reached 100 people, consisting of backend engineers, frontend engineers, mobile engineers, QA engineers, IT specialists, data analysts, engineering managers, directors and many other roles. That’s almost one-third of Mews. Nine years ago, when I started at Mews, I could hardly imagine not only such a big team but also […]
We took the Pragmatic Engineer Test. This is the result.
Some time ago, Gergely Orosz published the Pragmatic Engineer Test, a set of 12 questions to get a sense of what a tech company is like from the engineering culture perspective. It captures another angle or lens you can use when assessing a tech company as a potential employer. If I were a software engineer […]
Gaining a sense of accomplishment as a manager
Do you often feel like you got nothing done by the end of the day? That you lack any sense of accomplishment, which you had as an individual contributor, but now cannot find as a manager? That you approach things reactively instead of proactively? That you are not feeling in control or on top of […]
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 […]
How we selected infrastructure as code tool that is the best fit for us
Why define infrastructure through code? There is a lot of chatter lately about infrastructure as code in the Cloud engineers/DevOps community, but one should not get hyped up about the latest technology/framework/library and invest time and resources into it right away. That could easily turn into a huge waste of time when you realize after […]
Declarative Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi
Infrastructure as code (IaC) has been a big project for us recently, and we clearly saw the benefits it would bring. These benefits include applying our existing review process to our infrastructure (not just to the application code); using languages, tools, and build chains that we already know; and allowing for scenarios that are difficult […]
VP of Engineering @ Mews
A look back on my 1st year 🚀 Take off Life is fun! Joining a new company in April 2020 couldn’t have been easier: The Prague HQ office got closed due to the virus whose name we shall not mention. That said, all my individual introductions with engineers, team leads, my peers, and the leadership […]
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 […]
How to Make Your Teams Beat OKRs
and deliver 80%+ of key results consistently. Many tech companies have adopted the OKR system. Compared to the old-fashioned yearly SMART goals, the shorter quarterly-based objectives of OKRs are more likely to result in strategic initiative completion due to the shorter feedback loop and regular monthly updates. On the other hand, it is more challenging […]
Incident management for 10+ cross-functional teams
When scaling our tech organization, the biggest paradigm shift happened at around 20 developers. Prior to that, we had a single tech team that was taking care of everything. The only distinctions in this team were by function: backend developers, frontend developers, etc. Different functions had distinct methods of logging, error reporting, and performance monitoring. […]
Pair programming in the Payments team
A few months ago, we had a discussion about problems that members of the Payments team face. We identified knowledge sharing as the main problem: the Payments team takes care of payments, obviously, but that means communication with payment service providers, card tokenization, payment automation… And it’s not just a complex domain, but also an […]
Custom Neural Networks in a Browser
Neural Networks can do a lot of things. Personally, the way they find patterns in a set of complex data always felt like magic to me, even after I started understanding how they work. They have a lot of potential uses and being able to run them in a browser opens a lot more doors. […]
Learn or die
At work, do you need to be a stronger weightlifter to outdo more senior guys? Not necessarily. The difference lies in learning. You will come to a point where knowledge gathering from more senior peers becomes less enriching. While reading, you might stumble upon an article describing an obscure tool or innovative technology which could solve […]
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 […]
Delivering payment requests: one of our killer features
In this article, I would like to reveal how software development works at MEWS. The development team is product-oriented, meaning that we focus on a single product and do not build applications on demand. We provide multiple applications for hoteliers and other providers whose services can be booked for certain time periods. I will use […]
How to excel in engineering management
For a Software Developer, it can feel unrealistic to think of being the Engineering Manager of, say, dozens of people in the future. Time passes by. The future turns into the present. One day you realize that being a manager has the potential to dramatically increase the influence you have. Together with your teams, you […]
How to build career framework like an RPG
The CTO role, especially for a first-timer, is sometimes tough because nobody gives you specific things to work on or tackle. Of course, there are some expectations imposed on the technical department which can be summarized as “delivering quality solutions as fast as possible”. People outside of tech or product would sum it up as […]
How to build trust with engineering teams
In engineering management, my vision is to create a productive software delivery environment that developers are proud to work in, with a focus on tangible outcomes across the company. It’s a system with the proper guidelines and the right level of automation, so standard development work gets done seamlessly. That’s why, in the engineering department, […]
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 […]
Find the purpose
Three months back, I started my journey of VP of Engineering in Mews. In the following blogpost, I’d like to elaborate on my experience and discoveries so far. Build on your Experience On my path, I was fortunate to work with leaders worth following. I learned a lot from others. When I couldn’t find such […]
Project Spacetime
Elon Musk is known for his extremely ambitious and admirable visions, SpaceX being one of them. Based on the title, it might look like we want to copy him and do something in space exploration… Even though I’m a big fan of physics and it would be really cool, that’s too big of a fish […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mews tech principles
In the year 2019, Mews tech team grew from 20 to 70 people. Leading such a big group of people (at least for me as a first time manager) brings lot of challenges, especially when the growth is as rapid as in our case. During this phase, I realized that we’re becoming a big unit […]
CI as continuous improvement
Everybody in tech world understands CI as continuous integration, but the other and maybe even more important meaning of this abbreviation is continuous improvement. It is easy to say that we encourage progress and learning, but as people get overwhelmed with daily tasks, these more abstract goals are pushed to background, unless you are super-disciplined. […]
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 […]
Automating code review
In Mews, we are big fans of code review. Not only because it prevents bugs, but also it serves as a natural place for information sharing. For newcomers, it’s the easiest way how to quickly get a picture of what’s currently being worked on and how other developers solve their issues. We encourage people to […]
Catch your bugs before your customers do
You’ve probably been there. Deploying your app to production, you might even have backend error logs setup, but whenever there is a javascript error, you wait for your customers to report it. And you should not. At Mews, we rely heavily on monitoring and automated error reporting. We use LogEntries to keep track of everything […]
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 […]
Startup vs. Azure – The Mews Story
Quite a while ago, I had the opportunity to give a talk for over 70 Czech developers on the very first Techloop.io TekTalk session. As I prefer textless slides so that people actually listen to me and do not read my slides, I have decided to write this text to capture the thoughts I was […]
