One month at Uswitch

I started as a Software Engineer at Uswitch a month ago and wanted to share some first impressions. I have been working as a developer for two years, after leaving my job in banking to do a coding bootcamp called Makers Academy.

Now, I’m on to my second developer role: working on the Broadband team here at Uswitch. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

Up and running

Day one started with a morning of inductions, getting my laptop, and being given a tour of the very stylish office. Every room has been designed like a room in a house, a home away from home. In one, people sit around a bathtub in place of a table; another is a tiled swimming pool. Because it wouldn’t be a home without a pool, obviously.

So far, so impressive. The task for the afternoon was to complete a (small) feature and deploy to production. I paired with another engineer on the team to get set up and have a brief introduction to the project. I wasn’t expecting to be up and running so quickly, but we were writing code before it got to mid-afternoon ‘snacktime’ (an office benefit I have grown particularly fond of). The deployment process was super simple thanks to a universal tool built by the infrastructure team that everyone can use to deploy and interact with Uswitch’s systems. It allows developers to easily run common tasks: for example, you can generate automated Drone deployments to Kubernetes with one command. It also handles connecting to the office VPN, and authenticating with the various services we use, including AWS and Vault.

What are we working on?

In the week I joined, the Broadband team had almost completed a project to migrate the website frontend to a new platform being rolled out across verticals. I worked on some of the few remaining bugs and missing components before getting to see the release process.

We first directed 10% of traffic to the new site while monitoring our error logs to make sure there were no major issues, followed by 50% the following week to check that conversion remained the same (or better) than on the original.

There were a couple of small issues that were quickly noticed and corrected as they were immediately obvious in the conversion rate. For example, the chevron icon on each deal is important for telling mobile users they can tap on a deal, and for the day that it was missing, conversion rate dropped 5%.

This served to highlight the value of user-centred design and maximising usability through visual cues. It also proved the effectiveness of the monitoring systems that bring instant attention to any variations in our key metrics.

The Broadband team utilises A/B testing and data at every stage of the product development process. Initial experiments are conducted to test the validity of a hypothesis and how a new design or feature affects clicks and sales before iterating further. Decisions are always made with the data to back them up rather than on assumptions.

A flexible approach to agile

The Broadband team consists of several different functions: Product, who build features; Commercial, who work with providers to drive profit growth and deal with sponsorship; and Marketing, who focus on user acquisition, sales, and conversion. Everyone works closely together, attends daily standup, and tracks their work on the backlog Trello board. We have several projects on the go involving different team members, but we are also reactive to issues or new ideas as they come up. For example, if the Commercial team sees a timely opportunity to try out a sponsored feature based on what providers have said or a particular deal that is on, the Product team can act on that and be flexible about shifting other work into the backlog. There are no silos, and everyone is very much aligned to the same set of goals.

The processes the team uses are equally flexible and tailored to what works for them, taking the most useful parts from agile frameworks. For example, we do standup, keep a Kanban style backlog, and conduct retrospectives, but we don’t do estimation sessions.

Some examples of the workshops I’ve taken part in so far include a kick off for a new project around segmenting users to provide a more personalised experience, where we broke out into groups to explore and generate new ideas. Another was a special kind of retrospective called a ‘futurespective’ where we brainstormed challenges we may run into for the coming six months and how to mitigate them.

The verdict

In the past month, I have begun to see some of the advanced technical challenges that the engineers at Uswitch are working on. It is without a doubt an inspiring place to be for someone who wants to collaborate on solving a varied range of problems by understanding the business context. From product development to testing ways to drive profit growth and efficiencies, there are many skills to develop here. I’m very excited to be starting that journey with the Broadband team.

We’re looking for more people to join us. Our careers page has more information on becoming a Software Engineer at Uswitch.