Hello!
At CARTO we are looking for the next person to join our frontend team. You can read the job description at [https://www.workable.com/j/4147A21DA5], but I want to tell you first-hand how working with us is like. You'll get a better idea on what to expect from our team.
At CARTO we are organized in area teams (like frontend) but we create dynamic squads to address specific projects. Squads allow us to tackle a project with the goal of offering the right deliverables at the end of the dev cycle. We create something that truly gives value. I know, I know... everybody sings the mantra of providing customer value continuously so now it seems like saying "blah blah" but trust me: it's true. We're a product company and we always have in mind that our work is going to be used by somebody.
What does this mean for you as a member of the frontend team? In what kind of projects will you be working?
We're now living interesting times. In the past we were very focused on Builder, our flagship project, but now our work is more diverse. We're in the process of creating new products, new libraries, new technology, to empower the applications that are built on top of our platform.
Let's begin with the newest. You can be assigned to the squad that works on Airship. Airship is a component library which helps developers getting a beautiful and functional user interface in no time. The project needs coding styles and web components, tests to make sure everything looks good. We also need to prepare documentation to make the life easier to our users.
In another cycle you may be working with CARTO-VL, our vector rendering library. Instead of explaining what it's about, take a look on the projects that our workmates did in an internal hackaton.
Or perhaps you'll need to dig into Builder, the tool that has enabled people with no knowledge of GIS or cartography to come up with awesome map visualizations and geospatial analyses. If you've ever seen a CARTO map in a news site, most likely it's been made with Builder.
There are more projects that we're now kicking off that I can't speak publicly about yet. If you want to know more, apply to our offer ;)
Here at CARTO we value honesty and transparency. So let me tell you a bit about bad parts you might see if you join our frontend team.
Sometimes you'll have to fight with a bug in Builder where you'll have to dive into "legacy" code. By "legacy" we understand a "code with more than three years". In frontend time it seems a huge period. But we are talking about a solid and powerful product that it's widely used. That bug will take you to add only two lines of code but you'll swim in deep waters for several hours until you find the root cause. Don't worry. You'll only need to raise your hand and we'll help you if you need it. Sometimes you'll have to work on our Response Team, where we focus in helping our colleagues from Support to close urgent and priority tickets as soon as we can. It's part of our duty.
I've talked a lot about projects, technology, product... but the best part of the job will be your teammates. They'll challenge you to do your job better and better. They'll help you when you need it. You'll learn from everyone. You'll teach everybody. You'll need to step your meme game up in Slack.
We are all very committed to improve our platform. Every single week someone says "we could do this and then this process will take less time" or "we need to try this approach for...". Every time we see something that can be better, we say it. The ideas that stick end up being implemented. Sometimes it takes one day to tackle them. Sometimes it takes several months until we can address them. Some ideas win. Some are discarded. But we have the mindset of continuous improvement and everyone can impact our final solutions.
Even though we work in different squads, every week we spent some time catching up, to know who is working on what and to spread knowledge among us.
We work very focused but we do a conscious effort to have a healthy life/work balance. Of course sometimes we need to push a bit harder, for example, the GDPR deadline was a bit tough to achieve, but it's something not very usual to be honest.
You can check all this directly in our repos. Almost all our projects are open source so you can check them in GitHub. Take a look at the code but the most interesting part is in the issues and PR threads. You may see how we discuss, how we code review, how we interact with our friends from design, with the people from infrastructure, with our colleagues from Solutions, to come up with the best work possible.
If after reading this you feel like knowing us more, ping me. I'll be more than happy to have a chat and give you more info about the life at CARTO. Or better, apply to the offer and come to work with Botella, Elena, Iago, Roman, Victor, Jesus and me.
Happy mapping!
ivan [at] carto.com