DevConf - The Software Craftsmen Festival for Sharing Knowledge and Inspiration (https://devconf.pl/)

In Shedul/Fresha: we’re not doing Scrum, we’re not using a commodity language / development platform, our architecture is neither a monolith nor micro-services, we don’t have HR / Recruitment dept or even formal “bosses”. We’re not following any hype or re-inventing everything from scratch either. And despite all these NOTs, we’re a serious engineering bunch on a continuously raising curve (for 4 years already), having a consistent exponential growth (business activity volume) month-to-month. How come?

Instead of copying unicorns, we’ve started with very simple solutions & are applying self-disciplined Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) to adjust them to our local needs, specifics & conditions. That’s how Triumvirate was born, that’s why we use Elixir, put our Architecture under Scalpel, follow the Bossless style of ownership, put everyone’s Skin in the Game, found our Hedgehog Concept, etc.

The purpose of this talk is to convince you that copying 1:1 what has worked for other companies does not make sense, neither does mindlessly following consultants’ “best practices”. What works much better is building high internal awareness of your work, measuring what matters & continuously learning (& improving!) via series of small, time-bound experiments. This thesis will be backed up with the series of “war-story” examples of how we’ve evolved something towards (usually) the better in a sometimes very un-obvious way :)