x
Subscribe to our blog
Posted 8 October 2019 by
Joachim Lasoen
VP Solution for Binocs Technology

Binocs engineering practices and values

Binocs, part of bluecrux, is a fast-growing global company (with offices in Belgium and the US), driven by our mission and opportunity to lead a new category of software. No matter what team you work with, you will be welcomed, challenged, and supported to do your best work and make an impact.

When you want to apply, you probably have loads of questions. Let us try to answer some already. Below we summarized our development culture and how our values translate into daily practices.

What is the development culture in Binocs?

Start-to-Finish Ownership

Our developers wear many hats. It’s important that the team carries the whole product. From building features, fixing (support) bugs, optimizing queries to maintaining Azure. We don’t silo within the team.

Flexible Work Arrangements

  • Remote work is possible and even encouraged.
  • If you’re living in Belgium, we do try to work together, at least 1 day, in our Mechelen offices on Monday. Great for some face to face bonding with your fellow engineers.
  • You can start whenever you want. We have a short stand up meeting (remote) at 9 am, but if we need to rearrange we can discuss it with the team.

Light Meetings

  • We prevent meetings from overwhelming an engineer’s schedule and protect your ‘maker time’ as much as possible. We only do a short status update every morning at 9 am.
  • Every 6 weeks we do a company-wide half-day meeting to learn from our colleagues (customer success managers, support, sales, marketing, …). These meetings are intended to learn, but also to socialize with colleagues and understand how we impact our customers.

Product-Driven

  • The product manager is closely involved with the development team.
  • You’ll always have a clear view of the direction the product is going and why.
  • Priorities can change but are always discussed together. New things coming in the sprint means other stuff is going out.

Work/Life Balance

  • Unless you’re on call to execute a deploy or maintenance job outside business hours we respect your personal time.
  • You can disable Slack during weekends and after 6 pm 😉

Agile is the way

  • We work in 6-week cycles. Every 6 weeks we release a batch of improvements to the user acceptance server (and 2 weeks later to the production server)
  • The cycle is split into three 2-week sprints. Together with the product manager, the dev team defines the work for each sprint.

High-potential code base

We’re not going to lie: we definitely have some legacy code you’ll have to ax your way through from time to time, but because of our modular architecture, we are still able to work with the latest technologies and play with the latest innovations.

Code reviews are an important pillar. We always review each other’s code, style, naming, implementation, file commits, high-level understanding…

Good teams use good tooling

All good code is incubated in a good editor. At Binocs we use Visual studio and Resharper for our backend code. Our frontend code lives in visual studio code. We use NPM and Nuget to manage our dependencies.

Things that can be automated will be automated. Don’t flick an eye if you find multiple .bat files in our solution!

To version our code there is only one viable option: TFVC… No way just kidding: GIT FTW! We collaborate on our code using a trunk-based strategy. We host our wiki, code, and pipelines on Azure DevOps.

Good tooling also provides a way of life. We use TSLint to ensure proper frontend coding conventions and let Resharper decide them at the backend.

Continuous Delivery

Since we use trunk-based development, we can’t afford a faulty master branch. Every feature branch is build using an azure DevOps pipeline. These pipelines test and lint the code. After a completed pull request the code is ready to go to our test environment. Hereafter our QA assures we delivered our user stories per spec.

After 3 sprints of development and QA, we release the code to our UAT environment. Two weeks later we’re ready to go to production.

Oh and the best of it? Every single thing is automated. From the completion of the pull request until a new version in production!

Apply now

Search for the job offer that suits you and send an application that speaks directly to this position. Show us your role in Binocs’s future and Binocs’s role in yours.

We appreciate the generosity and courage that go into giving us that consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.