How Everli sets up remote employees for success on day one

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As a remote-first company, the Everli team knows how important it is to make our team members feel welcome from day one. Research tells us that a good onboarding experience can help retain employees for longer and keep everyone motivated. As a fast-growing company who has hired 118 new employees so far this year, it’s even more important that we pay extra attention to this process.

So, how do we onboard employees remotely, the Everli way?

All new team members get a tailored onboarding plan

The first day in a new job can be a bit daunting. In fact, it’s almost like the adult version of going to a new school, but without mum or dad to make the snacks! There are new tech systems to get used to, new names to remember and so much information to process on day one. 

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How to scale a tech team, the Everli way

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Everli was founded in 2014 in Verona, a lovely city in Northern Italy. Tech was the first team at Everli to go fully remote (back in 2017) and this wasn’t an employer branding gimmick, it was out of simple necessity. To find the team of our dreams, we had to look beyond Verona where there is a much smaller startup scene than other European cities. 

As CTO, I faced the huge challenge of scaling an engineering team in a city where there were not many engineers, and where it was tough to convince engineers to relocate to. In 2017, we were a team of eight people based in Verona. Today, in 2021, we are an awesome global team of 62 engineers with 12 nationalities and people based all over Europe. Here’s what I learnt about how to scale a remote tech team.

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The story of migration from Angular to Vue (Part 1)

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Challenge.

It was over two years ago when I joined Everli. Besides usual duties, I was given the tremendous opportunity to migrate the frontend of a complex e-commerce system from Angular to Vue. It’s this type of a challenge you wait most of your life as a developer to be able to use all of your past experience and build something new and as close to “perfection” as it can be.

The most crucial requirement, at that time, was to avoid big rollouts and make every release as much valuable and smooth as possible. Back then, It sounded pretty complex, but it was vital for the company, which was about to double the number of users in the next months. We were growing fast, and new markets were about to be conquered. With my buddy Nicola, we decided to take the small steps and take the pressure off our shoulders by replacing Angular with Vue bit by bit.

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Firebreaks, shall we?

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When I’ve started writing this article, it was already outdated; as a matter of fact, during these days the 2nd Edition of the Firebreaks is happening.

Firebreaks were one brand new initiative that we tried for the first time three months ago; you may have already read something about it, but we never had the chance to properly describe what is it, why we decided to do that and how it works.

First of all – as you might guess – we didn’t invent this ceremony; on the contrary, it is something that we copied and adapted to our organization.

In short, Firebreaks are a huge, challenging and inspiring initiative, with all the Engineering, Product, Design and Analytics teams involved.

Now that I hope I’ve got your curiosity, we can dive deep into it!

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Ever dreamt of faster Xcode builds?

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We have.

Everli iOS apps get new amazing features every week, constantly growing bigger and more complex, this makes Xcode build times grow proportionally.

Of course, one solution might be to regularly update your hardware, but here we’re going to talk about a free software alternative to that. In the Everli iOS team, we decided to give PodBuilder a spin, and we did right.

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Firebreaks – the spark 🔥

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Firebreaks

Recently, the R&D Team at Everli embraced a super challenging initiative that we call Firebreaks! 🔥🔥🔥🚒

This served as a natural breakpoint as teams wind down their old missions and prepare to start their new ones. It’s an excellent opportunity to pursue other work that’s of interest to them and of value to the organization.

Our colleagues ventured into several workshops and tested themselves in a five days sprint!

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Tagging & Seasonality

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In our work in Everli, one of the most important aspects is to provide reliable product info about products in stores. Product info is a bunch of different aspects of an item, like name, weight, price, and so on. All of them are stored in our Catalog and, for each of them, we use a specific logic in order to have the best info possible. Today we are going to focus on a very complex aspect:  the seasonality.

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Saturation, or how much time did our couriers actually work?

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One of the questions I get more frequently when I say that I am a Data Engineer is “but what do you do?”. Depending on who you ask, you can receive a variety of answers, especially related to the tools and skills we may use. If you ask me that question and you know about data processes, I will answer “we’re the backend of the Data Scientists”. If you don’t have a clue about data-related jobs, I will answer “we organize big amounts of data”. And by “organize”, what I mean is “clean, model, calculate, store and make available”.

In Everli, I’m in charge of data related to our shoppers, from the moment they apply to one of our job offers until they deliver an order to a customer. This process involves more factors than you may think because we need to have the right amount of shoppers recruited and the right amount of shoppers working exactly when they are needed. The main goal is to balance a good service to our customers and the wellbeing of our shoppers.

This balance has been a challenge since the beginning, and this example is only one more step in finding the best fit for our needs. It has also been a data modeling challenge, and a great opportunity to dig deeper into shopper data. And now I can explain one of the things a Data Engineer does!

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A Brief History of Price Update (Part 2)

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Here we go again.
This is the second episode of our docuseries about how we are managing retailers’ data for our beloved customers.
If you did not read our previous post about this topic, you should spend a few minutes catching up on it.
With this part, we would like to introduce the hidden aspect of our product and I promise, it is not a buzzword: Machine Learning.
In the following paragraphs, we are going to show new technical improvements and the analytics aspects under the hood.

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