At Vinted, we have Guilds. No, not the World of Warcraft type - if this was based on computer games, I’d push, oh, so hard for us to have factions (go figure). The Spotify type. At Vinted, a Guild unifies people from different product teams who own and develop a certain area - backend, iOS, analysts, design - to name a few.
Every other thursday we have a Guild day. That’s a whole day dedicated to Guild efforts. People in a Guild conceive their own initiatives, form teams, make a backlog of tasks and work away.
Quite predictably, the iOS Guild will be working on something new and cool, like Vinted for Apple TV, the design Guild might be working on something they call “posh feed”, while we in the backend Guild work mostly on making our life easier via automation of reoccurring tasks and give engineering love to parts of our backend system that no team can reasonably own. Say, the background jobs.
We rely on background jobs for a lot of things - from sending CRM emails and push notifications, to processing transactions. In all our portals combined, we process hundreds of jobs per second under normal circumstances and thousands if we have an intensive CRM campaign going on.
It’s a critical piece of our infrastructure. I was quite surprised when on my first weeks at Vinted I took at look at our Resque admin panel and asked my fellow backenders:
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