Development Life

AGILE-ISH: MVP AND ITERATE!

Over the years, we’ve adapted the best parts of agile that work for us and left the rest. We now run two fla­vors of agile – Scrum and Kan­ban. Teams pick the option that best suit their needs, but across teams we believe that all projects – no mat­ter how big – can be bro­ken down into small pieces and worked on iter­a­tively. Ticketing work keeps us accountable about scope changes and ensures vis­i­bil­ity into the pro­gress of each piece of a project. Nobody likes code that just sits as a work-in-progress, so we deploy frequently. Our code runs through auto­mated testing as well as user testing.

FLEXIBILITY

Life is full of important things outside of the office! Patientco has designed our work environment to ensure the sanc­tity of your time. We have optimized our office lay­out, min­i­miz­ing meet­ings for developers, and des­ig­nat­ing an “on call” engi­neer to pre­vent unnec­es­sary inter­rup­tions. We promote cross-team collaboration and believe that people working side-by-side achieves the best results. While we do not have an official remote-work policy, we are very flexible in accommodating our engineers’ needs. We want to build something fantastic together!

CODE REVIEWS

We invest in code from the begin­ning. 100% of our code goes through a peer code review process. The Patientco engineering team also has deep-dive reviews of features or services where teams gather to show off what they’ve built and give and receive feedback on their code. Finally, we have a security review framework to review code and validate that it doesn’t violate secure design principles such as the OWASP top ten or the SANS 25. This ensures we’re secure and compliant.

TESTING

Tests shouldn’t be a sep­a­rate ticket or process — it’s a step in the core ticket. Since we han­dle healthcare and pay­ments data, our code needs to be right. We have an exten­sive suite of automated unit tests (PHPunit), inte­gra­tion tests and front-end tests. We’re not strictly test dri­ven, nor do we think 100% code cov­er­age is the right strat­egy – it’s about being smart and bal­anced. Through it all, we work together to ensure that we test features before we deploy.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

At Patientco we believe in improving each and every day, so every week teams gather for ret­ro­spec­tive meet­ings. We will discuss everything that went well and things that we as a team can improve upon. You’ll have a voice, every week. We have blameless post-mortems for when issues arise in our code, infrastructure or process. We discuss what went wrong, why it went wrong and how we can improve our processes to prevent the same thing from happening again. For us, it’s important to remember that it’s not our people that break things, it’s our processes that allowed something to be broken.

VARIED WORK

Being a growing company allows a greater variety of work for our developers. We don’t silo people into a particular project or type of development. The work bal­ance is split across pro­duct enhance­ments, new services, and support/maintenance. One week you’ll be adding in new features to one of our applications and the next week you could be working on a high-avail­abil­ity, robust trans­ac­tion engine. We’re solv­ing new chal­lenges every day to make our pro­duct bet­ter for health systems and patients because they deserve better than the status quo.

APPLICATION STACK

Patientco has a diverse application stack. Whether it’s built with Javascript (Angular and Vue), PHP, Ruby or Go, we allow our developers to use a variety of languages that best fit the application. We believe different tools are right for different types of jobs while also creating a standard, fully automated CI/CD ecosystem and library of tools so it’s easy for developers to ship powerful applications, quickly and safely. Use of industry standard, open source tools allow for easy integration and onboarding of new engineers.

INFRASTRUCTURE

We use Kubernetes container orchestration technology to provide the most reliable infrastructure and developer experience possible. We’ve built upon services from multiple cloud providers to create a secure, compliant environment while enabling fast, safe deployments and integrations. With applications and systems deployed across availability zones and regions, we make it easy for developers to build reliable experiences, at scale.