This month, it’s 3 months since we set up our engineering community for software engineers, platform engineers, service managers and quality analysts at the Co-op. It’s early days but it’s already helping move Co-op engineering in the right direction.
Getting together with people who do similar jobs helps us all be more joined up which is really important, especially in a place as big as the Co-op. Without a community, we’d be working in isolation because our day jobs are within Co-op Digital, Co-op Legal Services or Funeralcare.
When we began meeting regularly, we identified the areas we need to work together to develop, including how we support training and development and coming up with development standards.
We’ve created infrastructure standards
I was really pleased to see that practices such as Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure as Code were already well established when I joined Co-op Digital 6 months ago. However teams were working in isolation at that point. Lots of them had similar problems and were tackling them in different ways. This meant that getting some of the services we were launching to a point where they were secure, reliable and supported was trickier than it needed to be because there was quite a bit of rework involved.
To make things simpler, we spent time during our community of practice meet-ups to create shared standards for our platform infrastructure. There’s still plenty to do and these things are never really finished of course, but we’re now in a much better shape and future projects will follow a much easier path. Most importantly, teams are more empowered to get on with stuff and do their job.
We’re also working on standards for how we’ll support cloud infrastructure across several teams. This work will sit with our Digital Operations team which is forming steadily.
Making better technology decisions
Out of that also came a clear need to provide better support around making technology decisions. We want teams to be empowered, but at the same time there’s always going to be a limit on how many different technologies we can support and maintain. Our approach has been to try and provide really great guidance so teams can make decisions in context rather than needing meetings to make decisions. It’s all still quite early days so again we’ll hopefully come back again soon and update on how it’s getting on.
We’ve been hiring
We’ve worked with some great external companies while we’ve been adding gradually to our in-house expertise but we’re at a stage now where we’re looking to bring in a significant number of software and platform engineers. The Co-op Digital team and the wider engineering community of practice is looking forward to new talent joining us. From there, the culture of the team will grow and strengthen.
If you’re interested, take a look at our Work with us page for the roles we currently have open. We’ll be recruiting for engineers for the Funeralcare team shortly.
In the meantime, sign up to the blog and follow Co-op Digital on Twitter.
Rob Bowley
Head of Engineering
