Let's talk about Front-End

Christian tells you more about working on the Front-End of kununu and why this job is so special

Interview

Hi Christian, tell us ...

... a little bit more about why you like working as a Front-End developer at kununu? 

There is a very positive culture among all Front-End developers. We are connected through the guild where we align across teams and talk about newest developments. Also our teams focus is on traffic so it is important to have good page performance, which is interesting to research and optimize.

 

How would you describe the working atmosphere in your team? 

Our atmosphere is very fun and supportive. We are all eager to help out each other and have some fun talks regularly, which really boosts the team spirit. Also everyone in the team is very passionate about the product so we bring in ideas that are not only heard but also are reflected in what we build.

 

Can you give us some insights on your latest project? Or Can you share an example of a feature you built that had a significant impact on user experience? 

In kununu we use a UI library that provides a set of UI components to each team in a unified design. We have a GitHub workflow in place that could deploy a new package version to the npm repository.

However, we used to document the changelog for components in the code in a certain documentation file. The package version in this changelog therefore needed to be manually set with the version you will publish as soon as it is merged to master. If other developers merged a change to master, while you were working on a separate branch you needed to update your version in the changelog.

This could lead to 2 different problems:

  1. The changelog is incorrect if the version was not updated manually
  2. You had to do new commits just for updating the version number and therefore needing another PR approval, slowing down the development process.

To solve this problem I extended the GitHub actions that takes the updated version of the package.json and adds it to each documentation file automatically and commits it to the repository. With that we do not have the manual step anymore of defining the version for the changelog documentation.

What were the biggest challenges you faced during this project?

Testing and debugging with GitHub actions was a risky process. I needed to trigger real commits in a PR and run the GitHub action inside the repository to test it. This lead to version conflicts of our npm package in the npm repository, which caused the next real releases to fail. I was there to support my engineering colleagues and monitored the pipeline. The issues could then be solved really fast but it was a stressful 2 days for me.

What role does collaboration play in Front-End development at kununu?

Collaboration is vital to our daily tasks. We regularly jump on pair programming sessions in our team, not only between the Front-Ends but also between Front-End and Back-End. Issues that we encountered are brought to our guild so we reduce the risk of running into the same issues twice. It not only improves our performance but it also fosters a positive culture and autonomy.

 

What are some key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that your team focuses on when evaluating a project’s success?

While we have KPIs based on the project that we work on, we also follow some engineering KPIs as a whole on kununu engineering. These include:

  • Deployment Frequency
  • Lead Time for Changes
  • Time To Restore
  • Change Failure Rate

We keep an eye on them as a team and use them to improve our own performance and our time to deliver new features.

Most of the projects in my team are based upon SEO Rankings and Traffic as KPIs, since this is also the goal of our tribe.

 

Are there any initiatives in place that allow team members to pitch new ideas, improvements or new working methods?

In the past we did not only participate in the Hackweek, but we also had design sprints where new ideas come to life. A design sprint normally takes a week and incorporates people from different departments, like Design, Product, BI and Engineering. It is vital to get a high diversity in team members for that sprint to get opinions of different perspectives.

What tools and technologies do you use for version control, collaboration, and task management?

We use a very typical stack in the Industry: Git, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence. For deployments we mostly use tekton but aso sometimes GitHub Actions.

What is the next big project you are working on? Any interesting challenges ahead?

We will improve our job title company pages. It is the section of kununu where you can get insights about the salaries of a specific job title on a certain profile.

These pages are quite old and we want to improve our SEO rankings and traffics on these pages. Over the next couple of months we will introduce our modern design and combine new products like kununu jobs into these pages. It is going to be an interesting project, since the people who are now in the team did not originally build them. There will be many opportunities to grow and optimize the existing product.

 

And last but not least: What qualities do you think are essential for succeeding in the engineering field at kununu? Any tips for someone who thinks to apply at the New Work Group?

Be creative, solution oriented and reflect on your strengths and weaknesses. Coding is only a part of the skillset for an engineer, it is also essential to be able to learn from past mistakes and be collaborative. Be responsible for the software you build.

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