In the beginning of 2020, we in the Synergy team — the team in charge of the cloud infrastructure, devops, SRE, chaos team — had the goal of implementing Istio by the end of the year. Before we started to focus on Istio, we took a look at all the…

Luke Wroblewski’s book, MOBILE FIRST, was published nearly ten years ago. I remember being incredibly excited and inspired by the concept of “mobile-first” and put it to work right away. Ten years on, you might think that this feels like a rather old fashioned or irrelevant strategy to be discussing…

I led the Self Assessment redesign in the Crunch app, giving freelancers and small business owners in the UK a faster and more convenient way to submit their tax return. The team was called “удача”, which means “luck” in Russian, and it was made by one Product Manager, one Scrum…

At Crunch, we like getting features into our users’ hands as soon as they’re ready. The purpose of testing is to let us know if we’re about to break something while doing this! Puppeteer is part of our E2E testing process. What is E2E testing? 🤔 End To End (E2E) testing means firing-up a “copy”…

When we need technical information about one of our projects, we want it to exist and to be correct. We likely need it in a hurry, perhaps to diagnose something important. All too often, such documentation is missing, incomplete, inconsistent, or has grown useless…

Spring Cloud Config provides server-side and client-side support for externalized configuration in a distributed system. We’ve used it for two and a half years as the principal configuration mechanism for all our JVM services and Pytests, and have plans to put it to use within our front-end projects, too. While…

When one talks about companies using cutting-edge technologies in Brighton, Crunch is usually one of the first companies that comes up in conversation. That doesn’t mean we have no place to improve, but the amount of time we actually spend at the next level upgrading from one technology to another…

Over the past year, the Kotlin language has made slow but steady progress among our Java microservices, so it’s time we told the story of how this process started, how things are working out for us, and how the future looks. Although Kotlin is seen as new, it dates back…

In an ever-changing technical landscape, where more and more companies are trying to move into a continuous delivery approach, the demand for Automation QA Analysts is always increasing. The time for long manual checks of products just isn’t part of the new world order. Now is the time for manual…