Making Our Frontend Unit Tests Much Faster with @swc/jest

We were annoyed with the slow performance of our frontend unit tests, so we made them much faster! It turned out that swapping out the test runner is an easy and efficient way to keep the migration effort low, while reaping the benefits of much faster execution times.

Interview with Jesper

This is an interview with Small Improvement’s software developer Jesper Oskarsson about how the development team works together, what the tech stack looks like, and how big feature releases are tackled. If you want to read on, you find another developer interview here. Hey Jesper! You recently had your 5-year anniversary at Small Improvements, so…

Interview with Laura

This is an interview with Small Improvement’s software developer Laura Sochaczewski about how the development team works together, how sprints are organized, and how developers stay connected with customers. If you want to read on, you find another developer interview here. Hey Laura! You joined Small Improvements as software developer in 2019. Can you tell…

Boy fascinated by wall with snowflakes painted on it.

Non-Flaky builds with Nix Flakes and Hakyll

Let’s start with a beautiful quote, which also can act as a great summary of what I want to share: “If you need a readme.md explaining how to build a project, you already failed” – Eelco Dolstra With this in mind, try to think back if you ever tried to follow along in a tutorial…

Implementing Domain Driven Design at Small Improvements

We all love reading about the latest software developments trends and buzzwords but they can often turn out to be just that, buzzwords. For us at Small Improvements, Domain Driven Design (DDD) has really lived up to it’s own hype though and helped us build better software, faster and fewer bugs to boot. Do we have…

Building a Data Warehouse in our 20% time using Google Cloud

At Small Improvements, we are always keen to learn about our customers and how we can make the product better for them. Speaking to customers is great (and we do it all the time) but using the data we hold to find trends and usage patterns helps to find things that the customer won’t tell…

JSConf Iceland 2018

If there was one word to describe the theme of JSConfIS it would be experience. Beyond the wonder and fantastical environment of the conference’s location and backdrop (hosted in Reykjavik, Iceland at their world-famous Harpa concert hall) – the majority of talks focused on topics relating to both the user and the developer experience too. The…

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First Accessibility Workshop @ SI

We held our first accessibility workshop and in this post, we highlight our approach and key takeaways.

Visual Studio Code: Features, Customizations and Extensions to Make You More Productive

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is a powerful code editor — let’s look at lesser-known features, customizations and extensions that make you more productive!

Ideal team-size musings

We recently reached the size of 14 people in Development, and our goal is to get to 16 developers/designers in the next couple of months. An interesting question we faced and discussed in this context is that of “optimal team size”. In the past year we’ve typically worked in teams of three or four, but…

5 Lessons From Build Stuff 2017

At Small Improvements we each have a learning budget and get to choose which conferences we attend. It might seem a bit of an odd choice then that I stepped off the plane in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on a cold November afternoon. I was there for BuildStuff, a pretty special conference. The lineup was…

Beyond Tellerrand 2017

The four of us (Charisse, Jan, Paulo & Timur) arrived early for coffee. Right before the first talk in the morning we were welcomed by a very happy DJ. As it turned out later, he embedded snippets of the talks in his songs of vastly different genres in the breaks. Over the course of the…

Docker @ Small Improvements

Whalecome to this blog post 🐳. I want to share with you how we use Docker at Small Improvements, how it helps us to get our everyday tasks done and what we learned from working with it. For starters, I added an introductory section about what Docker actually is – if you are already familiar with…

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