Alexandre Serrurier, Lead Product Operations at ManoMano, puts forward a holistic approach to understanding and improving your ‘product environment’. What is the product environment? Why is it relevant? If you are into product, there is a high probability that you have heard the words ‘culture’, ‘organization’ and ‘framework’ many times. These terms are commonly used when product people discuss ways to improve their daily life … sometimes not very wisely. Of course these elements are important. However, during my 10 years in the field, I have often witnessed people, teams or leaders ..read more

Our job as software engineers is most of the time said to be “building” software and systems, but how often are we asked: “Hey how things are going on production?” Last year, we rebuilt the whole payment system at ManoMano which is, for a marketplace, a very important piece of the business. So, in addition of designing the new system, we also dedicated a significant amount of time to design and implement the observability and the monitoring of our new micro-services. This article aims at sharing how we proceeded, how we iterated over our solutions in order to have something that suits our  ..read more

Code review is one of the most used methods in software development. We all know what are the benefits of doing code review. To sum up, doing code review enables verification of new code quality by identifying future bugs, ensuring tested code, and ensuring readable code. Moreover, by reading code written by others, developers can learn from others. A junior developer can learn by reading the code of a more experienced one. They can ask questions using comments. Vice versa a senior developer can check the code of a junior developer and provide constructive feedback. I won’t go deepe ..read more

Image generated using Canva.com Are you looking for ways to revolutionize your API testing process, boost collaboration and deliver superior results more quickly? Postbot — the latest AI-powered feature from Postman — is set to do just that. In this article, we will explore the amazing benefits, practical applications, limitations and promising future possibilities that Postbot AI brings to API testing. As a member of the QA team, we aimed to enhance our collaboration and interactions on back-end testing, with a keen focus on APIs. Fortunately, during ManoMano’s Continuous Improvement Wee ..read more

Photo by Andrew Neel on UnsplashWhy explore a new test approach? Innovation and continuous improvement are important for companies to adapt to the challenges. As Staff QA, I am always challenging the status quo. Especially, with my team, we are looking for improvements to our test strategy and practices. Our context: ManoMano has opted for a microservices architecture. Of course, our testing strategy includes (automatic) API testing. However, we had several questions. How can we be more user-focused regarding API testing? How can we continue to detect new defects, avoiding the pesticide p ..read more

In a world where automation has become the norm, the appeal of practices like chaos engineering, with its inherently uncertain outcomes, can be challenging for developers to embrace. The solution for encouraging developers to adopt best practices when deploying to the cloud lies in platform engineering. To help you catch up, in case you missed the train, here’s a concise definition: Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. — Luca Galan ..read more

It’s been a little over a week since ManoMano’s first ever Hacking Weeks have concluded and now that I’ve had some time to reflect on how things went, I’d like to take you through this adventure, its challenges, learnings and promising next steps. Introduction You have probably heard about this concept but it wouldn’t hurt to just take some time to shed some more details on the what and the why of the Hacking Weeks. To begin with, innovation or hacking or brainstorming days or weeks, call them however you like, are essentially giving the teams that are normally churning out new and e ..read more

How we secured calls between microservices at ManoMano Another step towards zero trust for ManoMano’s information system. No matter how strong and high your peripheral protections may be, someone, someday, will manage to overcome them. You should therefore never consider your backend to be a fundamentally secure place. If, like us, you have opted for a microservices-based architecture, it means that someone, one day, will take control of one of your components and will try to exploit every opportunity to steal your data or damage your system. Your mission is therefore twofold: on th ..read more

“A day as a spectator at this web performance conference.” On May 10, 2023, I had the chance to attend the We Love Speed conference in Paris. It was a pleasant event, and the attendees were mostly professional and focused on the subject matter. Overheard conversations while waiting for the doors to open and during the cloakroom queue hinted at a promising day ahead. I must mention the warm welcome, complete with breakfast. ? With numerous speakers scheduled throughout the day, choices had to be made. My program consisted of the following talks: 1) Taming the Web Performance Impact of Th ..read more

What is kong & why we’re relying on it If you’re a frequent reader, you might already be familiar with Kong API Gateway thanks to previous articles more developer-focused like this one: Improve your Kong Plugin Experience (https://medium.com/manomano-tech/improve-your-kong-plugin-experience-2e4bad9d6178?source=friends_link&sk=e362d5926727f4eac35ff76584060048) If not, you can either read past blog posts as an introduction, or consider Kong as a “huge black-box that uses nginx & lua to create a clean approach to reverse-proxying” ? Legend here Side note here: ashort talk was giv ..read more