Our Engineering Best Practices – what are yours?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Piotr Banasik

This blog post is not for the average PayrollHero user, fan or follower, and not for the faint of heart – we must warn you that it’s quite technical!

However, we would love feedback/comments from you developers/programmers/techies out there!

As a bit of background, the PayrollHero Engineering team has a mandatory weekly meeting with every Engineer in attendance. We use that meeting as a forum to work out any issues we’re having, or discuss stuff that’s been bugging us, and even set policies.

We wrote out some of the best practices we already have in use, and some more that we may want to adopt, and then we voted them in as standards for the team, which will essentially becomes our constitution. Our goal is that these Best Practices will help us create higher quality code, and at the same time avoid some typical internal conflicts.

This list is a work in progress, and every other week we agree to add or modify items. I’ve pasted them here below the break since it’s quite a list!

We’d like to invite feedback on this list. Where this stacks up against stuff your developers/programmers/engineers do? Your comments are welcome, please let us know what you think.

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PayrollHero Manila Bootcamp Recap

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

We ran the first PayrollHero bootcamp in Manila, Philippines the other day and it was a great success. We had a full house of customers interested in learning more about the PayrollHero platform and how the time, attendance, scheduling and payroll functionality works within their operations. Below are a few pictures from the event… hopefully you can make our next bootcamp!

(above: Nick Franklin, Zendesk Head of Southeast Asia Sales dropped by to showcase the Zendesk product)

(above: Anna, Cres and Tin, PayrollHero bootcamp leaders)
541233_584423674904039_2134292382_n (above: Tin getting the bootcamp setup)

Crocodile in the Yangtze: Asia Premier Screening (& Contest)

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Exciting news! PayrollHero has arranged for the Asia Premier of the film “Crocodile in the Yangtze” to be showcased in the Philippines. We have put together an exclusive event and we are flying in the director, Porter Erisman, to join us!

A big thanks to EO Philippines and Amazon AWS for sponsoring the event along with us to make it happen. While the event is invite only, we are giving away 2 tickets – all you need to do is head over to the PayrollHero Facebook page and comment on why you should be chosen to attend. We will pick two lucky people to join us.

About Crocodile in the Yangtze:

Crocodile in the Yangtze follows China’s first Internet entrepreneur and former English teacher, Jack Ma, as he battles US giant eBay on the way to building China’s first global Internet company, Alibaba Group. An independent memoir written, directed and produced by an American who worked in Ma’s company for eight years, Crocodile in the Yangtze captures the emotional ups and downs of life in a Chinese Internet startup at a time when the Internet brought China face-to-face with the West.

Crocodile in the Yangtze draws on 200 hours of archival footage filmed by over 35 sources between 1995 and 2009. The film presents a strikingly candid portrait of Ma and his company, told from the point of view of an American fly on a Chinese wall who witnessed the successes and the mistakes Alibaba encountered as it grew from a small apartment into a global company employing 16,000 staff.

PayrollHero Adventure Engineering Team Grows By +1

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

It’s not hard to imagine why people love to visit Beautiful British Columbia. With mountains, ocean and dozens of reasons to spend time indoors and out, those of us who live here count ourselves lucky, and those who visit can’t wait to come back.

Andrew Narkewicz joins PayrollHero

PayrollHero‘s newest staff member is Andrew Narkewicz – a Full Stack Ruby Engineer who tends to live in Ops – thrilled with his career move to PayrollHero in Whistler, where we are headquartered. Andrew attended UBC in Computer Science and most recently worked for Versapay as their Lead infrastructure developer.

What’s a typical work day like, at PayrollHero? There is no typical around here! We know that we get the best ideas from our talented recruits by giving them flexibility. Whether it’s 4-days-on and 3-days-off, or working weekends instead of only weekdays to take advantage time on the hill when the snow is best and the lines are shortest, or longer days with extra time banked for that great pow day, or a long weekend every couple of weeks. Flex-time is even more enticing when you live where the activities seem limitless, and your everyday life feels like a vacation… or at least looks like it to the outside world!

Blackcomb Mountain Pow

Whistler is proving to be a fantastic place to build a business: with its reasonable cost of living, rent, and ease of recruiting people to live and work in a veritable paradise. Whistler is a natural choice for Andrew, originally from Colorado. He loves ‘sledding’ (a casual term given to snowmobiling), which Whistler’s backcountry has plenty of room for! Andrew has joined us to live the best “Whistler Lifestyle” he can, taking every opportunity to play outside, with our blessing!

Don’t think we’re not hard at work, here at PayrollHero! Just because we post [seemingly constant] photos of our adventures doesn’t mean we don’t put in our dues! We’re busy at work, but we set up our business to attract and retain the best sales engineers, developers, iOS and Machine learning engineers, and customer service reps, so that we can create, build and maintain a great web-based payroll program.

Are you fit to be our next Whistler Engineering Team Hero? We are always looking for new teammates – at the office and at play! Drop us a line!