Pros
I’ve been at Volusion for a few years. I’ve also worked for 5 other tech companies in my career so I think I’ve seen my fair share of Engineering best practices and poor practices. To be honest… Volusion had been on the poor practices side for a while. It wasn’t horrible… but it was far from great and I’ve stayed because the compensation is surprisingly above average. Like it’s pretty good. The tech is changing though and that’s actually why I’m writing this. I don’t know what exactly happened. I think it was a couple things. It seems like all of a sudden the company kind of woke up and had this realization that things need to change, tech needed to be updated, etc. It was a rejuvenated push to better the department. There was also leadership overhaul about a year and a half ago. We made a push to consolidate on one cloud, GCP, and we took a bunch of old small, distributed repos that were living in lambdas with a bunch of boilerplate in each one, all talking to the same database (like a poor attempt at micro services) and put them in a single express app that’s now dockerized and running in a kubernetes cluster. We’re fixing a poor monitoring “solution” and we’re in the process of moving an old angular 1.5 front-end to React. We’ve also recently integrated GraphQL endpoints. I’m honestly pretty impressed with the progress that’s been made here.
Cons
It’s been a little stressful as it feels like we needed to learn a lot really fast to help improve the platform but I think it’s finally stabilizing and I feel better about what I’m working on.
