TechLead-Story: Michael Ionita-Ganea, CTO at Walls.io

Team

Size and Roles:

• The Dev team consists of 6 cross-functional members covering roles such as Full-Stack Developer, Product Designer, and DevOps.

Organization and Methodology:

• Organized via a Kanban Board with a structured process to ensure communication and quality.
• Weekly retrospectives and kick-offs for the upcoming week, ensuring a commitment to quality over meeting arbitrary deadlines.

Distinctive Team Aspects:

• Belief in developing features through experiments and not launching until they are truly finished and valuable.
• Emphasis on tackling challenges without being deterred by complexity or lack of existing solutions.
• Strong involvement in shaping the future and success of the company, fostering commitment and bonding with the product.

Recruiting

Integration in Recruiting Process:

• CTO is responsible for the recruiting process, with developers actively involved in interviewing and decision-making.
• Developers participate in coding challenges, code evaluation, and interviews to assess candidates.

Onboarding Procedure:

• New hires are expected to have their development environment set up within a maximum of one day.
• Introduction to the company's values, beliefs, and simple processes.

Qualities Beyond Technical Skills:

• Strong emphasis on communication skills and cultural fit within the team.
• Candidates are evaluated based on their alignment with the company's beliefs and their potential to contribute and expand on them.

Technologies

Technical Challenges:

• Current focus on breaking down a PHP monolith into smaller services with an elegant central API.
• Utilizing machine learning for image classification to enhance filtering and moderation features.

Evolution of Technology:

• Initially started with CakePHP and jQuery.
• Currently rewriting the product using modern technologies, transitioning UI to ReactJS, evolving the backend into a more API-centric architecture.
• Planning to increase reliance on NodeJS and replace PHP where applicable in the backend.