As of last Sunday, I’ve been working at Kobas for five years (a demi-decade 😅) , reading my post from a month in reminds me how much has changed and prompted me to provide an update.

Job Role

My job role has changed significantly throughout my time at Kobas. Initially, I was feature-focused and spent all my time programming. As time passed, I became more involved with bug fixes and technical product management: planning features, evaluating APIs and implementing technologies. We’ve also expanded our team along the way, so I’ve experienced our onboarding process from both sides. 😆

Issue Management

Previously we were using Pivotal Tracker for our issue management, while it did work great for planning features, it was lacking in terms of bug management. I worked on moving us over to YouTrack, which at the time required utilising both the Pivotal Tracker export API and the YouTrack API (a fun task 😁). YouTrack has worked great for us so far, we use their Agile Boards for sprints, project planning and issue triage.

Working Location

COVID-19 isn’t something I’ve posted about on here yet, which is strange considering that’s been the main subject of the past year. Before COVID-19, Kobas was hybrid-remote, having staff members working from home a certain % of the week, but still maintaining an office that could host all our staff members.

We’ve now transitioned to being completely remote, which I prefer. I’ve found GitLab guide on remote work fantastic for resources surrounding working remotely. Overall, I think our transition to remote work has gone smoothly as we already had a lot of technology in place to support remote work (like a VPN).

Features

We’ve made some impressive stuff for our clients since my last post, too much to really talk about without this becoming a changelog. The most recent thing that comes to mind is the Customer Interaction Centre, providing our clients with a way to support online ordering.

Other projects that come to mind when I think of my time here are: integrating PDQ terminals using socket connections (much fun), rewriting our stock system to support FIFO (not fun), and moving our API authentication over to OAuth 2.0 (easier to support third-party integrations).

Upgrades

We like to keep all our technology up to date in Kobas, and the last five years has seen a lot of upgrades.

Our back-end now runs on PHP 7.4 (currently working on upgrading to PHP 8) with CentOS 8 Stream as the OS. Our main framework is Symfony 5, after a lot of work migrating from Silex. 😬

On the front-end, we’ve added ReactJS into the mix, and new projects are now done in that. Lastly, on the automated testing front, we are still using Codeception but are moving our acceptance tests to Cypress.

Future

As evidenced by this year, it’s impossible to know what the future holds. But I hope to be able to post more about the work I’m doing at Kobas on here, as I’m aiming to add more open source projects. Stay tuned. 😉

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