I have had the pleasure over the past three months of being Sittercity’s first technology intern. It has been an exciting and wild ride; full of fun and learning!

Over the past several years, the QA team at Sittercity has gone through a drastic transformation. We have moved from a completely manual testing process, to a nearly fully automated testing platform that has helped streamline our product delivery pipeline.

This post will take you through the journey of the QA team throughout the past few years, and outline where we plan to go in the future.

This month Sittercity Tech has released a new project on GitHub: gocumber!

So what is gocumber (besides a goofy name)? Gocumber is a package written in Go that is used for parsing and executing Gherkin. It was created while we were writing our first Go service here at Sittercity. Perhaps unsurprisingly based on its name it is an attempt to build a Cucumber-like tool for Go.

To understand why it was necessary it will help to understand a bit about how we develop.

Last month the Sittercity tech team released Flagon, a simple gem that you can use to quickly set up feature flags in your project without worrying about how you might need to store these flags in different environments.

Feature flags you say…

Okay, let’s make sure we’re all reading the same page.

Imagine you are developing a particularly risky piece of code. Your client has asked for the ability to turn the risky feature off at the snap of a finger if anything goes wrong in the wild, and you need a way to flick that switch.

This is a common scenario that many software engineers have encountered before and many more will encounter in the future, these switches we use to turn features on and off are often called feature flags.

Welcome! This here is our new blog! As is fitting of a new journal let’s start ourselves off with an introduction to Sittercity Tech.

What we do

So! Sittercity. What do we do? Sittercity is a service that connects families and sitters. Our goal is to help parents find the best caregiver possible for their child.

From a technology perspective this means providing a highly available platform in the form of our site for parents to post jobs, sitters to search for the best opportunities, and for both sides to communicate and organize childcare opportunities. In addition, there are a myriad of background processes surrounding safety, additional communication, and other supporting services that help us deliver a high quality product for our customers.

Technology

From a technology perspective we are in a state of transition (which we plan to discuss more in the coming weeks). We are primarily a ruby shop at the moment and most of our engineers consider themselves rubyists. Ruby on Rails does a lot of heavy lifting in our stack but we have evolved into a true polyglot shop over the last few months, with Golang making a large impact on our internal ecosystem. We’re moving away from a large-scale rails project and into the world of microservices. Definitely look for more on this front.

On the Operations side we are an AWS shop and are quickly transitioning into the world of LXC, which has a huge impact on how we develop and deliver projects in the future.

Design Principles

Sittercity Tech is filled with highly opinionated individuals and that’s the way we like it. We all care deeply about the ‘right’ way to accomplish a task (even though we tend to disagree on what that might mean). We feel very strongly that it is extremely important to fill our team with passionate people that really, really want to develop high-quality code.

We are huge, huge proponents of SOLID and attempt to apply it to all aspects of our development work. We consider ourselves an agile (lower-case ‘a’) shop, running one or two week sprints and performing daily stand-ups to provide updates on our status. We’re constantly looking to improve our processes, however, as evidenced by our recent shift to a continuous delivery model. We pick and choose the best aspects of agile to help us achieve our goals.

We are also big believers in test-driven development. We strive for 100% test coverage and expect all developers to write tests before writing code and to be constantly running the test suite.

Sneak peak at upcoming topics

So what do we have planned for the coming weeks? We have a few topics on the pipeline:

• Introduction of Go into our stack
• Creation of Go tools
• A look into quality assurance at Sittercity
• Our evolution into a true polygot shop
• Time effective tests and test-driven development

Stay tuned!