This is an interview with Small Improvement’s software developer Jesper Oskarsson about how the development team works together, what the tech stack looks like, and how big feature releases are tackled. If you want to read on, you find another developer interview here. Hey Jesper! You recently had your 5-year anniversary at Small Improvements, so […]
#how we work
32 posts
16 Aug 2022
This is an interview with Small Improvement’s software developer Laura Sochaczewski about how the development team works together, how sprints are organized, and how developers stay connected with customers. If you want to read on, you find another developer interview here. Hey Laura! You joined Small Improvements as software developer in 2019. Can you tell […]
3 May 2019
We all love reading about the latest software developments trends and buzzwords but they can often turn out to be just that, buzzwords. For us at Small Improvements, Domain Driven Design (DDD) has really lived up to it’s own hype though and helped us build better software, faster and fewer bugs to boot. Do we have […]
22 Jan 2019
At Small Improvements, we are always keen to learn about our customers and how we can make the product better for them. Speaking to customers is great (and we do it all the time) but using the data we hold to find trends and usage patterns helps to find things that the customer won’t tell […]
23 Apr 2018
If there was one word to describe the theme of JSConfIS it would be experience. Beyond the wonder and fantastical environment of the conference’s location and backdrop (hosted in Reykjavik, Iceland at their world-famous Harpa concert hall) – the majority of talks focused on topics relating to both the user and the developer experience too. The […]
13 Feb 2018
Visual Studio Code: Features, Customizations and Extensions to Make You More Productive
Small ImprovementsMicrosoft's Visual Studio Code is a powerful code editor — let's look at lesser-known features, customizations and extensions that make you more productive!
30 Jan 2018
We recently reached the size of 14 people in Development, and our goal is to get to 16 developers/designers in the next couple of months. An interesting question we faced and discussed in this context is that of “optimal team size”. In the past year we’ve typically worked in teams of three or four, but […]
5 Dec 2017
At Small Improvements we each have a learning budget and get to choose which conferences we attend. It might seem a bit of an odd choice then that I stepped off the plane in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on a cold November afternoon. I was there for BuildStuff, a pretty special conference. The lineup was […]
22 Nov 2017
The four of us (Charisse, Jan, Paulo & Timur) arrived early for coffee. Right before the first talk in the morning we were welcomed by a very happy DJ. As it turned out later, he embedded snippets of the talks in his songs of vastly different genres in the breaks. Over the course of the […]
20 Oct 2017
Whalecome to this blog post 🐳. I want to share with you how we use Docker at Small Improvements, how it helps us to get our everyday tasks done and what we learned from working with it. For starters, I added an introductory section about what Docker actually is – if you are already familiar with […]
5 Oct 2017
It was a couple of months or so ago when I came across this conference called FullStack Fest, skimming through the agenda, I was immediately intrigued and thought “I’ve got to check this out”. The coolest bit? The conference was taking part in the beautiful city of Barcelona. September finally came around, and just as […]
12 Sept 2017
Here at Small Improvements we have 3 development teams. Each team is an autonomous unit that consists of frontend & backend developers, UI/UX developers and designers, so that they can build and ship features independently. In this blogpost we want to share an insight into what the development process looks like in Team Green. We […]
28 Aug 2017
The first half of 2017 has been quite a busy year for us. With all the features that’ve been rolling out, fixes to deploy, improvements to discuss, design and implement, it can be hard to organise an event that won’t disrupt everybody’s flow. Until we realize that there is never a “right” time. Here in […]
30 May 2017
Recently three of our developers attended the CSSconf 2017 in Berlin. The talks have been inspiring for us and once again we got clear about what a mature language CSS has become by now. The steady addition of new features continue to amaze and the enthusiasm of the community is infectious. The conference itself was […]
5 Dec 2016
By Peter Crona and Michael Ruhwedel First of all, it was an amazing conference as always. None of us presented this year, but look for us in the future. Many of us at Small Improvements tend to go to more specific conferences, such as React Europe, DockerCon or JSUnconf. GOTO is more of a generic software engineering […]
30 Sept 2016
We recently launched our new Activity Stream. What began as a small idea turned into quite the large engineering undertaking. The results are astonishing, but it was a lot of hard work. In this part we’ll share how the design took shape. Whiteboard and paper drawings Each larger project at Small Improvements begins with […]
15 Aug 2016
Small Improvements conducts Hackathons every few months which usually involves two days of hacking on an experimental project. Hacking doesn’t imply that it’s a “developers-only” affair either; other departments at Small Improvements like Customer Success and Marketing also get a chance to get experimental too. Hackathons usually give us a chance to really get creative […]
19 Jul 2016
I like to think of myself as a coder of convenience. I often tell myself this work is just a means to an end – I am only coding till I can afford to spend the rest of my days lying in a hammock, drinking out of a coconut. But that’s not really true. If […]
5 Jul 2016
After a significant project involving making Small Improvements responsive, we came up with some UI ‘rules’ that we in the design team or (‘UI Taskforce’) agreed upon. The longer we worked on this refactoring and ‘cleaning up’ of the app’s style, the more we realised the importance of (finally) having a Style Guide. At Small Improvements, […]
15 May 2016
Development is hard. But communication is even harder – especially across departments and continents. Our SI Process Hacks series will highlight a few simple hacks we wish we had known right from the start! The problem We deploy many times a day – bugfixes, feature improvements, new options, changes in user flows etc. As a […]
7 May 2016
The challenge: Scaling Our dev team has reached a quite impressive size these days! Unfortunately I just don’t scale to this size. I can’t possibly conduct 1:1s, listen to feedback, give feedback and help people grow in a flat team of 12 people. While I don’t code anymore these days, and have assigned most project […]
2 May 2016
I recently participated in Softwareskills’ Liar’s Dice competition, and since people have expressed interest to hear about how I managed to win, I decided to summarize the process and results. As I prize I got 500SEK at Teknikmagasinet (Swedish store), a USB memory and this nice piece of paper :) Liar’s Dice and the Competition […]
12 Nov 2015
In October Kristof, Kolja and me visited the AMUSE conference in Budapest. First UX conference for all of us! We went to stay for a whole week and used the first days for a ‘User Interface Retreat’ in our apartment. The AMUSE partners with the CRUNCH conference about big data and shares a lot of the infrastructure like […]
29 Sept 2015
Our company bootstrapped from one developer (me) into a team of 12 developers. The transition was not always easy: More people means more dev power, but also more communication and alignment needs. When we reached a team size of 10 in July, we decided to split them team into 3 fairly independent subteams. Last month […]
12 Feb 2014
Dozens of VC firms reached out to us in 2013, so we sent our pitch deck around the world quite frequently. After a while we started sharing our deck with job applicants as well: We’re such a small startup, and many applicants had doubts about joining us. Access to our deck and our key metrics […]
30 Jan 2014
The Static Showdown is a virtual worldwide hackathon for frontend-engineers. Hacking is more fun together – thus we provide our Berlin office as a central hub during the competition. The competition starts on Saturday, 8th of February, 1am Berlin time. You then have precisely 48 hours to develop your app. Anything that you can run on a static web […]
15 Aug 2013
We finally took the plunge and invested some 1200 Euro into buying a good coffee machine. Wow, these latte macchiatos are truly amazing! Worth every penny. Looking for a job with great coffee? Join us!
3 Jun 2013
Incredible. These tech whiz-kids get younger every year!
4 Apr 2013
It all started way too early for our taste, but we made it to Berlin Expert days in time! We’re looking forward to the talks, and to meeting tons of nerdy Java developers! If you have any questions about our job offers, don’t hesitate to bump into us. Spot us by looking for our T-Shirts, […]
22 Feb 2013
Using the right technology is important to boost your development efficiency. But efficiency alone isn’t sufficient, you need to boost employee morale as well. Among the core ingredient to employee happiness are the company’s working conditions. And of course the office space itself plays a major role in that. We just moved into our new […]
19 Feb 2013
We’re a tiny startup, and yet we’re able to compete with some heavy weight companies. For instance, our main competitor Rypple launched two years ahead of us, received millions in funding, was led by a team of experienced entrepreneurs and staff, and got acquired by Salesforce last year. We have: No funding, no entrepreneurs, mostly […]
16 Jan 2013
We’re looking for a fulltime Junior Java Developer based in Berlin. Your first major task: Visit some of our clients in New York! Are you looking for a challenging job that involves some customer interaction too? You’ve come to the right place! While we build our software in Berlin and don’t really have to visit […]