September 2023 Summaries

Maintaining a culture of speed and innovation, the company emphasizes rapid deployment and iterative coding as a core principle, allowing them to respond swiftly to customer feedback and drive innovation. They consistently deploy changes over ten times a day, even on weekends, and have embedded this ethos into their organizational culture and tooling. The strategy includes "Day 1 Deploys," where new engineers are empowered to make and deploy changes on their first day, facilitated by a streamlined onboarding process and supportive hiring managers. Additionally, each pull request is treated as an independent, complete environment with its own infrastructure, allowing side-by-side testing of different features without contention over a single staging environment. This approach is supported by Render's Pull Request Environments, which use a declarative format to efficiently clone the necessary application servers and databases for each pull request.

A company focused on rapid innovation attributes its success to a fast-paced deployment strategy that emphasizes quick iteration and direct work in production environments. They frequently deploy updates, sometimes up to 15 times a day, including weekends, fostering a culture of speed and responsiveness to customer feedback. Two key principles underpin their approach: "Day 1 Deploys" and comprehensive pull request (PR) reviews. "Day 1 Deploys" ensure new engineers can contribute code changes from their first day, facilitated by a streamlined onboarding process and supportive hiring managers. For PR reviews, each request generates a unique, standalone environment for testing, allowing for side-by-side evaluations of different UI interactions without conflict over shared resources. This is achieved using Render's Pull Request Environments via Blueprints, which automate the creation of isolated environments for each PR.

Josie Steffens, a Design Engineer at ICON Engineering in Denver, Colorado, primarily focuses on floodplain analysis and master planning, collaborating with local city governments, municipalities, smaller clients, contractors, and construction crews. She extensively uses QGIS due to its modeling features like the Hydrologic Engineering Center River Analysis System (HEC-RAS), favoring it over paid alternatives. One challenge she faced was the difficulty in sharing HEC-RAS results, which required stakeholders to access the model on their own or wait until project completion for feedback. The 'Add to Felt' plugin effectively addressed this issue by allowing her to share QGIS results online, facilitating collaboration and feedback from clients and teammates, and has become a crucial tool in her mapping workflow.

Josie Steffens, a Design Engineer at ICON Engineering in Denver, specializes in floodplain analysis and master planning, primarily collaborating with local governments and municipalities, along with smaller clients and contractors. She utilizes QGIS daily for its robust modeling features, such as the Hydrologic Engineering Center River Analysis System (HEC-RAS), which she prefers over paid alternatives. Although HEC-RAS is highly effective, sharing its results can be challenging because stakeholders need to access the model on their desktops or wait for project completion to give feedback. The 'Add to Felt' plugin has resolved this issue by enabling Josie to display QGIS results online for easy sharing and feedback, making it an essential component of her mapping toolkit.