Ivan16.09.2022 15:46
Pracownik
Hello dear gowork.pl community,
My name is Ivan, and I am the VP of Engineering in billwerk and simultaneously a location manager of the Polish office. I see that you are interested in some information about us, and I am here to share more insights and answer your questions.
A few words about me:
I am originally from Belarus, worked as a Software Engineer for a long time, and in 2021 I relocated to Gdansk with my family. At this point, I prefer to use English for communication, but I have already started to learn Polish.
About the company:
billwerk is a product company that offers a subscription management software and recurring billing solution. Started as a startup in 2015 in Germany, we are now one of the leading platforms in the European market. More insight about the product itself you could find on our websitehttps://billwerk.io/product/features/
Over time we have opened a development centre in Belarus and also in Poland one year ago. Due to political reasons and the war in Ukraine, we have relocated the vast majority of our team from Belarus. Also, we were able to help with the relocation of our Ukrainian teammates. Last year, we extended our recruitment to Poland, and we are looking forward to getting more native people on board.
With the help of a partnership with PSG (https://www.psgequity.com/portfolio/billwerk) we have employed many excellent engineers over the past year in different locations and also acquired two companies, Sofacto (France) and reepay (Denmark). I would like to mention that we are not building Polish or Belarusian organizations. We want to construct a European company where people across all locations will be treated equally and feel like part of a team in all our locations.
In addition to recruiting, we were busy establishing our internal process in the Polish office. Polish law and market are quite different from what we have in Germany or Belarus, so it took some time to finalize everything. This is one reason for a misunderstanding with some previous employees. As a result, it helped us to fix issues and change the situation. At this point, we clearly understand how and what we must do concerning our teammates. In addition to this, we established benefits that help our team:
- PPK
- Medical package in Medicover
- Multisport Plus
- 50% compensation for work-related public transport expenses in Gdansk
- Home office
Regarding remote work and home office: We expect that team members in Gdansk will meet in the office periodically and, as a result, have a policy of about 50% in office time, which was on hold during covid.
From the engineering perspective, it is clear that we have a legacy area in our solution. We have been developing the platform for the last 7 years. As for any startup, we sometimes prioritize already finished features over perfect code. I am glad to share that we get rid of this practice and now prioritize code quality higher. We like to follow the idea described by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob): "Always leave the code better than you found it.". We are writing unit/integration tests.
We follow BDD and use specflow with selenium to cover the solution by UI tests. BDD also helps us to close a gap in documentation - we are constantly writing (usunięte przez administratora) and maintaining the expected behaviour of the solution.
In addition, we are proud that we can do a continuous delivery to our end system and have strict continuous integration pipelines to help us with this. As a result, we can deploy some of our systems daily or a few times.
We are focusing on API development and all of our logic on the backend. Over the last few years, we have migrated our platform from the .net framework to .net.core, and now we are using .net 6. In addition, we are trying to reduce the complexity and coupling of our solution by evolving our architecture and extracting more or less isolated modules.
We are using mongo DB as a database and as well changed a few versions over the last few years. Currently, we are using version 5 (the newest stable one). In addition, I have to admit that we have extensive databases and care about performance and optimization in this area.
*I have to continue in a comment because gowork has a 5000 symbols limit for comments.