OmbuLabs Blog

I joined OmbuLabs as a Senior Software Engineer on February 11, which was a Friday-more on this later! Tomorrow I will have completed 2 weeks here. So if you want to find out about the onboarding process at OmbuLabs, read on.

OmbuLabs is a fully remote company based out of Philadelphia with team members in many countries. Currently we are growing pretty steadily, and we thought it would be a good idea to let prospective employees know what it would be like to work at OmbuLabs.

This article is based on questions we often get during interviews, so we hope it helps if you are thinking about applying to OmbuLabs. You can learn more about the recruitment process here.

One of the main goals we set for 2021 is to become more efficient as an agile team. And one of the challenges we addressed was how to minimize the decision-making bottleneck. To confront that we decided to take some actions that I’m listing below.

As a software consulting company, we bill for the time we work on client projects. So it is vital for us to keep track of the time we put into every task. We’ve had some trouble over the years with our time tracking, and sometimes that led us to work more time than what we finally billed for. We would like to share some of the experience we have collected over the years and the tools that we currently use.

At OmbuLabs we use Tettra to power our knowledge base. As a remote, distributed team it is very important to us to have our content structured and organized. We follow some good practices to keep it organized and up to date, which we describe here, and we use Tettra to keep our knowledge organized and integrated with the tools we use on a daily basis.

As a distributed, remote team we use different tools to communicate at OmbuLabs, like Slack and Zoom. Those are great for live communication. But every company has information that needs to be kept and stored somewhere. In our case, we started off using the GitHub Wiki and Google Docs. However, documentation and policies need to be maintained, updated and checked regularly. And having information scattered in different tools, formats and accounts became a hassle.

That’s where a knowledge base comes in. At OmbuLabs we use Tettra and we will share our experience in a different article. But regardless of what tool you choose, here are some practices that will help you keep your knowledge base organized and updated.

The discussion around the use of problematic words / terms in technology isn’t a new one. This issue can be traced back to, at least, 2003 when a Los Angeles county worker filed a complaint with the city’s Office of Affirmative Action Compliance after seeing “master” and “slave” in computer equipment labels.

This issue has resurfaced with recent events and, at OmbuLabs, we believe it is important to take it seriously. It is past time to remove this metaphor from our codebase and review some of the terminology we use. We have started taking the necessary steps to rename “master” branches to “main”, as well as (and perhaps more importantly) remove any reference to the term “slave” and replace “whitelist / blacklist” with “allowlist / blocklist”. Our team is actively working on that.

But we understand that is not enough. This is not an action that will solve racism by itself. It’s part of a larger commitment. In this article, I’ll explain the context and motivation for this change and how it fits with our core values and long term vision as a company.

This is our process to hire new full-time developers at OmbuLabs. It’s a process that we have been improving ever since we started our operations. It’s very important for us to hire “A” players.

In this article we will focus on how we evaluate new developers, but parts of the process can be customized for other positions as well.