An engineering-biased perspective of CybSafe
Written by @Michaela Gasteratou , @Jessie Auguste
See also Product & Engineering roles at CybSafe
Creative & Design
The team of self-styled “visual alchemists” leads the CybSafe brand and shapes the product itself – from visual identity and the design system to campaign assets and the website. They keep all things CybSafe looking sharp while quietly evolving the brand on the side. Always fun to spy on their channel for the latest from the creative world 👀.
Content & Concepts
This team combines two incredible skillsets: deep expertise in cyber security threats and the writing skills to turn it into pragmatic advice that actually helps people. If they haven't already, this team will tell you about the importance of using Hemingway. Check it out!
Customer Success and Support
This team stays extremely close to our customers and is an important voice when it comes to recommending product features and improvements. For us engineers, their cool headed and professional approach is a lifeline if the platform hits any glitches or outages. We help them deliver automation with tools like HubSpot and Intercom, and from time to time we'll join customer calls to talk through integrations and optimisations.
Science and Research
Psychologists and behavioural scientists, working inside a software company. They bring scientific rigour and the latest research in cyber security and behavioural psychology, they shape the roadmap alongside us, and they keep us honest about whether what we build actually changes behaviour rather than just informing people. They also run private and government grant funded research, and their whitepapers and webinars are in the research section of cybsafe.com.
Keep a lookout for their talks at All Hands and Hackdays.
While we try to keep meetings to a minimum to help us focus on the tasks we are working on (including having a meeting free day at least once a week), we have a few ceremonies that take place through out our development cycle.
Following Shape up schedules we have a focus period of about 6-7 weeks and a cool down of 2-3 weeks. We kick off each focus period in a meeting that lines everyone up behind a shared goal, tactical or strategic. It closes with a demo session so the whole team can see what we have built.
Our cool down process starts off with a retro to reflect on what we have achieved and an opportunity for us to identify where we can further tweak our workflows.
Each morning, we have a short video standup with everyone in engineering and product to talk about the tasks we are working on and some coffee ☕️ to keep it moving as snappy as possible.
How We Organise
We use Shape Up development methodology and use notion to store our work packages so everyone can review, feedback and find out what we are up to.
Our codebase lives in a mono-repo on GitHub and we run a rotating bug schedule. We are a big fan of doing regular releases to our production site so we can show off all the great work we do. We have recruited Bob to help us do this. Our friendly neighbourhood slack bot which allows us to do releases from a slack channel anywhere we are. Larger changes go out behind feature flags and roll out in stages, starting with internal test accounts, so we can validate things in production without handing our customers any surprises.
Shaping never stops! We continue to shape work that is coming up and in the cool down we bring together the people we need to refine and discuss pieces of work. The engineering lead for each work package will put in a short catch up as an opportunity for us to talk about the technicalities, the outcome we want, and anything that looks missing or risky. By the time the work starts, most of the questions have already been answered.
Last but not least, we meet up at the end of a shape up cycle in Tech Friends to discuss ideas, future technologies, non-project related implementations we’d like to do that could improve the code base quality and also any frustrations we might have.
Frontend
The frontend uses React. We like to keep up to date with the cool things React release and so update it regularly with the help of Renovate. We use typescript and Carbon Components (with a few modifications). We also use Styled Components to build our custom components by writing our CSS in JS. On the testing side of things, we use Cypress for our functional and end to end tests. For our unit and snapshot tests we use React Testing Library. You can view our full tech stack here.
