A Look Inside Development at 500px

Devon Noel de Tilly, a QA Engineer at 500px, discusses her multifaceted role, which includes managing CI setup on Semaphore, maintaining automated tests, and collaborating closely with developers and sysadmins. At 500px, the workflow for feature development is highly collaborative and often stems from developer and designer ideas during monthly hack days, with user feedback and executive input also playing significant roles. Teams at 500px operate with a degree of autonomy, allowing them to choose their approach to development, which can vary significantly between teams, such as the platform team's preference for small, incremental tasks versus the web team's collective approach. The company tackles technical debt proactively, using tools like Code Climate and relying on team members to periodically address it. For major features, 500px employs a microservices architecture, breaking away from a monolithic Rails app to improve efficiency, with some services rewritten in Go for better performance. The culture at 500px emphasizes ownership and autonomy, encouraging employees to work on projects they are passionate about, fostering a sense of responsibility and innovation.