Ever wonder who the people that work on the development of Elhub are and what goes through their minds? Well, wonder no more – with the inception of the Elhub blog, we hope to contribute the occasional post where we riff on the technical topics that we find interesting, be they coding or productivity tips, product reviews/comparisons, gotchas, complains or whatever else happens to get someone from the development team to the keyboard.
Team Development designs, implements and maintains the code of the Elhub and EDIEL systems. We’re not the only team with developers in Elhub; you’ll find people with strong development skills throughout the organization, but we are the team responsible for the Elhub and EDIEL code itself. At the time of writing this, we are twenty-seven people – seventeen men and ten women – though we are always looking for more talented colleagues.
The story so far
The Elhub system went live in February 2019, but in a completely different environment than the one we have today. Development and maintenance of Elhub was solely the responsibility of the Elhub product vendor, and it was only towards the end of the year that it was decided to take over the development, operation and maintenance of the system within an in-house organization. At the time, Elhub had little more than a dozen technical personnel employed (including consultants). A little less than a year later, that organization had grown to around 50 people – both employees and consultants, and the Elhub system (plus all the supporting systems and operations required by a tech company) had been transferred from our product vendor to Elhub AS.
Going from a development team of a handful of people to around thirty people and taking over the development and maintenance of a system during a global pandemic is one of those challenges that nothing can really prepare you for. It is a testament to the fantastic team of people here at Elhub (both within and outside the Development team) that we succeeded in doing so while still keeping the lights on in the building, and continuing to deliver new features, fix bugs, and removing technical debt in the Elhub system.
The Transition
The transition from being a product owner to development company was a major one, and has necessarily led to a lot of organizational changes. Because of the rapid growth of the company during the period, we had to meld together multiple people from many different backgrounds and company cultures into a single team, all while working remotely from both Norway and India. Some of the employees who started during the pandemic literally did not get to meet any of their development team co-workers face to face until the pandemic restrictions lifted this fall (and by the time the restrictions lifted here in Norway, some of us had been working from home for eighteen months straight).
Adaptability was a key success factor for us. Even before the pandemic, we knew that there would be challenges to face in the rapid growth that would be required of us – the pandemic just made things ten times more challenging. One of the things that I’ve been most impressed with over the past two years is how well the team adapted and conquered these challenges. Not just the challenge of moving from the office to home, but also the new responsibilities, developing new workflows, routines, and ways of working. The individual’s ability to adapt to changing situations, responsibilities and problems was crucial to get through this trying period. As we begin work on the next big Elhub projects, I’m confident that adaptability will stand us in good stead. Without adaptability, there is no agility.
The pandemic also highlighted the value of a team with good social relations. Especially early on, we spent a fair amount of time on on-line social activities such as virtual fika (Sweden’s mandatory «coffee and cake break») as well as playing small, quick online games on Board Game Arena and elsewhere in addition to more «serious» activities such as our bi-weekly Tech Talks. Elhub itself holds regular quiz events in which some of us also participated. In our experience, the social capital accumulated through having fun together pays off down the road, when the going gets rougher.
In general, the pandemic did not impact our work hugely, but we did find ourselves spending a lot more time in on-line calls than we probably would have otherwise, even for a distributed team. One interesting development was that we pair-programmed a lot more during this period than I suspect would have been the case if the pandemic had not come along, which was definitely an advantage with respect to the knowledge transfer that we have also had to do during this period. As software developers, we have been privileged to be minimally inconvenienced by the pandemic.
The Road Ahead
One year down the road from the transition, where is the Elhub Development Team now?
The biggest project that is being worked on at the moment is the so-called 15-minute project. By 2023, all EU countries shall be capable of doing imbalance settlements on metering values using 15-minute resolution; enabling the Elhub system to handle these changes to data and computation requires a fair amount of work. This upgrade goes on in parallel with a lot of other project efforts to improve the Elhub infrastructure, including the shift of the production system into the cloud. The first twelve months since taking over the Elhub system has already seen many improvements, but there are still many things that can be done to make the system faster, better, and more robust. All of this, of course, goes on beside the day-to-day work of maintaining code, fixing bugs, and adding minor new features to the Elhub system itself.
Back when the development team was still only a handful of developers, we discussed what kind of organization we wanted to be. Roughly paraphrased, the goals that came out of that discussion were: To have fun, deliver high quality code, collaborate effectively, automate everything (both tests and deployment), and to keep learning. Almost eighteen months later, those words remain our lodestone.
As mentioned at the beginning, In the coming months we hope to share some of the lessons we’ve learned on this blog. You can also find some of our work on our Github.
Comic from geek-and-poke.com
Skrevet av Michael Akinde, Teamleder Utvikling.
