Switchfly Technical Blog
Welcome to Switchfly!
We are starting a technology blog to share our experiences and best practices as we grow our business and improve our people, processes, and platform.
Switchfly's internationalized, software platform powers travel and loyalty programs around the world. Our team is smart, fun, and creative - we also love to travel! We work in independent, cross-functional teams. Our technology stack consists of HTML, CSS, Twitter Bootstrap, JavaScript (jQuery, EmberJS, HandleBars), Freemarker, Java, Spring, Tomcat, Couchbase, and Postgres. Engineering uses Intellij, Git, Jenkins, Clover and run either OSX or Linux. IT uses Postgres, PgBouncer, GreenPlum, SOASTA, Capistrano, Splunk, TeaLeaf, AlertSite and VMWare.
We enhance and maintain a high availability, high traffic e-commerce platform for brand name clients across the globe - downtime is not an option. We design features that must be coherent and consistent, yet customizable to meet different client requirements. Our technology platform has to scale and handle unexpected traffic spikes as clients run simultaneous marketing promotions. We welcome these challenges!
Twice a year, the entire company participates in a hackathon. Team members choose their project and self select teams or go solo. Many project's make their way to Production including one that resulted in a 10% increase in customer conversion by simply displaying when fewer than 10 seats remained on a flight. We strongly encourage you to evangelize hackathons or innovation days at your organization. Atlassian provides a great guide.
Our team members consistently vote "the team" as the top reason for what makes Switchfly great. We rotate people across platform features and provide opportunities to learn and code across the entire tech stack. We are passionate about good design, continuous integration, test automation, retrospectives, and consistently improving our skills.
When not solving challenging problems and delivering value to our clients, we have fun! Free drinks/snacks, company Wednesday lunches, ping pong tournaments, yoga, annual Giants game, hackathons, ski trip, Tough Mudder, and triathlons. We are always looking for great people to join the team, follow us on Facebook, Twitter or apply today!
Paul Chen - Vice President, Engineering