Hello there!
Here are some things
I'd love to share about
ENGINEERING AT QWILR
Founded in Sydney in 2014
Replacing old-school documents with
Intelligent Webpages
Bringing Powerful Documents to You
Ever heard of documents that give you business insight, allow payments, seamlessly draw data from your CRMs and help you secure revenue quicker? Qwilr gives you that.
Our Customers
Over 50,000 users are using Qwilr to create intelligent documents, proposals and quotes for better business.
Our users span across a wide range of industries, from Education and Events, to Real Estate and Professional Services.
Our Investors
Work with smart people who care about what they do
We’ve got that list of impressive backgrounds we can reel off (Google, Microsoft, Campaign Monitor, Harvard etc) - but what you really need to know is this: Qwilr is fierce about finding the best people and providing them an environment to flourish. That means we’ve got a team of really smart people, who really care about, and take pride, in what they do.
The Hard Things (which are also the best things)
Breadth
Qwilr is a large, complex and multi-layered app used by tens of thousands of people conducting millions and millions dollars worth of business.
Because we are still a small team, that means a given Qwilr engineer might work on (take a breath): feature building, analytics and data crunching, build systems, Docker and container questions, infrastructure, load and scale questions, caching & CDN questions, headless browsers, low level APIs for our WYSIWYG editor and a lot more (okay, breathe out).
We aren’t a group of specialist engineers who own separate domains, we are generalists who form clusters around problems and come up with ways to solve them. To thrive in this environment you need to fundamentally love learning new things, improving where you might have gaps or weaknesses and embrace That Kindergarten Feeling of starting from a low knowledge baseline and figuring things out.
We’re a startup (no, really, we actually are)
At Qwilr we’re building something that has no precedent, dealing with tricky technical domains (WYSIWYG ain't easy!), chasing exponential growth and grappling with scarce resources. This is the genuine startup engineering experience. Sometimes that means making mistakes and that’s OK. In our experience, you'll need humility, independence and a good dose of fortitude. But if you’re the right kind of mind, it’s also the most fun you’ll ever have.
Engineering at Qwilr means:
- 🔨 Building the features of the Qwilr apps, as well as the systems and infrastructure that powers them.
- 🧐 Participate in and provide feedback on code reviews for other Qwilr engineers. We love code review because it sharpens our reasoning and grows our shared knowledge.
- 🤷 Ponder, discuss and enumerate different approaches to problems. We are big believers in solving problems early, in discussion, on whiteboards or design documents, before hitting code.
- 🚀 Participate in “Momentum Management” - this is an in-house process modelled on GTD. But don't be frightened by the word "process": our processes are about productivity and pragmatism, not about… process :)
We have a high bar of excellence
Our first principle as a company is “Undeniable Bestness”. We believe in winning our race by being the best, not through hacks, bandaids and shortcuts. This means we have a high bar of excellence at the company. For code, product and for people. We care about how expressive that function name is, whether we have boiled things down into the crispest abstractions and whether the pieces of a system fit together, as naturally as Lego. We go back to the drawing board when things aren't right, because we care deeply about the quality of what we produce.
Excellence meets velocity
There’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer says: “that’s future me’s problem”. It's funny in the context of the Simpsons, but less funny in the context of a complex and long-lived codebase. Qwilr engineers have the difficult task of managing tradeoffs between Current Us and Future Us. Respecting and thinking about this tradeoff is part of Qwilr’s second principle as a company: “Velocity With Valour”. And it’s no easy thing to do. But building this muscle and making it part of our daily conversation is what makes us a formidable product team.
Engineering is connected
We are a product driven company. That means that engineering operates very closely with design and product decisions are made in a wide context of concerns around our users and the business. This can be a challenging way to engineer because it means coding doesn’t happen in isolation, but it's an incredibly valuable mindset and skill set for engineers to have.
Our Tech Stack you ask?
We're agnostic when it comes to background, and we believe good engineers have the ability to pick up new frameworks and languages, but if you're interested, here's what we use
JavaScript - Angular - React - Node.js
TypeScript - Docker - Webpack - AWS - MongoDB
But you don't need to have done it all.
The Great Things
Impact
Every member of Qwilr (engineering or otherwise) is actively encouraged to input and contribute to the direction of the product and the company. We actually have a formal process around The Big Questions at Qwilr called “Group Think”. Ideas can come from any quarter and shape our whole trajectory.
Flexibility (aka be comfortable and produce good code)
Qwilr has no requirements about attire or what time you turn up at the office. Our ethos around issues like these can be summarised as: it's all about productivity. What we care about is that you produce quality code, solve problems well and collaborate well. For some people that means working from home a few days a week. For some people that means sleeping late and working in the night. For some people that means going to the gym in the middle of the day. Whatever it is that makes you comfortable, focused and able to produce great work and collaborate well.
Your life is compatible with Qwilr
Happy and healthy people can focus, push themselves when it matters and do great work. Exhausted and stressed people do not do good work. Period. Part of Qwilr’s focus on “Undeniable Bestness” is a focus on encouraging employees to be mentally rested, to take leave and to lead fulfilled lives outside of work. We want the best people and we want to keep them. Part of that means ensuring that life is compatible with Qwilr and ideally, enhance one another.
We work hard...but we always have fun doing it
2018 COMPANY RETREAT
Want to re-imagine
The World of Documents?
Hit me up at [email protected] or connect on Linkedin