Building Our Team - Start

Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash

73bit.com was started by Carlos da Costa around 2007. Both Gautam and Me have taken it forward since the past 5 years. We had a smaller team to help our clients. We have released to serve our clients with more useful and better technology we need a bigger team. We have a team of 15 people.

We are taking Carlos's guidance during the current times. Asking for his advice and one of the ideas came out during the conversation was to write a blog about our journey.

It will be an experience to share our vulnerability and journey to build our team.

Our team ideals

This one was written by Carlos back in the days

1. Know: Be curious - why was this change made, what does it do, does it do it correctly? Action: We will endeavour to understand all the code, regardless of who created it. We will read all code commits.
2. Reuse: Think "generic" - does this change apply to all sites or just this client?Action: We will not hard-code the site-specific code into the project. We will not add to the project what can be done using expressions stored in the DB.
3. Communicate: Be confident - always comfortable to state our own opinion, ask questions, admit when we don't understand something? Action: We will share what we're working on every working day, even if it's just to "touch base" and reaffirm what was previously discussed.
4. Test: Ensure our code can be easily tested - we need the up-to-date unit and integration tests for our work Action: We will make a habit of writing tests before we write code. We will extend our unit tests to cover old code so we can strive for a high percentage of code coverage.
5. Optimise: Do you have a good reason not to use the cache? Does this code need to run every request? Action: We will always consider performance when writing code. Even if it's just to discuss it with the rest of the team to see if there's more that should or can be done.

As you can see the ideals are more towards the Tech team and now our team has expanded with the Testing team, Operation team and Business Development team. We have 7 Tech members (1 Tech Lead, 3 Software Developers, 3 Junior Developers), 2 Testing members, 2 Operation members, 2 Business Development members and 2 of us (Gautam and Me).

The culture we want to build so that we would love to proudly say,

• We are makers
• We celebrate communication
• We help each other
• We enjoy our work
• We learn every day

Yes, that's what we are aiming for and currently, we are building the tech team first so that they can help the rest of the team to do their best job and live above values.

Thank you for reading, I will write once a week and share you our progress, challenges, pivots, actions, learnings, moments etc

Let's share stories about building teams