How Meetic works: an organization designed to ship fast and maintain quality

by Sebastien le gall, at 11 January 2023, category : Organization Management

Meetic, like most tech-first companies, needs to keep its code base clean and scalable. It is our biggest asset, and we need to take care of it. Most companies are either good at shipping fast or maintaining high code quality. Doing both is hard and we've been working on this topic for a while.

While there is still room for improvement, I considered we have found the right balance between long-term tech projects and product development. I'd like to share the receipt. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to organizations, roles, and processes. However, the organization I describe below and the design principles on which it relies are pretty common. Especially for companies that work with both web apps and native apps.

In this post, I'll deep dive into 3 key factors that have helped us achieve great product development success and high-quality standards :

  • The way we run our teams and our tech communities
  • The hard skills we expect from the Engineering Managers and the role the Tech Leads play in the tech communities
  • The hard and soft skills we expect from the Software Engineers

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A simple reverse proxy in Go using Gin

by Sebastien le gall, at 23 June 2020, category : Go

Reverse proxies are great to handle logging, tracing, and authentication on applications you don't own or which you cannot modify the source code to make them do what you need.

A reverse proxy is nothing more than an HTTP server that handles a request and makes the request to a backend server. When doing so, it may add some headers, log data about the request or stop the request if authentication fails.

Go provide a reverse proxy feature in its standard library. It's a great start, but you will probably find out it lacks some helper features such as logging or handling routing easily.

gin

On the other hand, Gin is a very popular and great web-based application framework. It helps to build powerful REST API quickly, it has a lot of useful features and it's very fast since it uses httprouter under the hood. The idea is to handle HTTP requests with Gin and then proxy the request to the backend using the built-in reverse proxy.

The ReverseProxy struct contains a Director field. A director a function where you tell the reverse proxy what to do with the incoming request. It is where you may change the host, maybe add some headers, or even check the authentication.

remote, err := url.Parse("http://myremotedomain.com")
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

proxy := httputil.NewSingleHostReverseProxy(remote)
proxy.Director = func(req *http.Request) {
	req.Host = remote.Host
	req.URL.Scheme = remote.Scheme
	req.URL.Host = remote.Host
}

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Parsing git status with Go

by Sebastien le gall, at 15 June 2020, category : Go Git

At work I often have to switch from a repo to another, making some changes here and not there, starting a new branch on repo A and then, fixing an issue on repo B. Ideally, a big fat monorepo should help me to deal with the ~40 apps and libs I work on. But monorepos have drawbacks when you're not Facebook or Google. By the time, they become heavier and soon a simple git status takes more than 2 seconds.

Instead of a monorepo I have built a few script helping me to deal with all those repos. One of them helps me knowing the status of each repository, just to know where I am and what I was doing before being interrupted.

So here we are… building a Go script to parse a git repository status.

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Hire engineers to solve your company issues, not complex maths problems you don't have

by Sebastien le gall, at 12 December 2019, category : Management Management 3.0 Culture Hiring

Let's face it, your company is not a Big Tech company. You, the reader, are probably not working for Google, Microsoft or Facebook and it's ok. A lot of companies not so big have a huge impact and very high tech challenges.

But not being a big tech company also means you probably won't be good at what you're doing if you act the same way Facebook or Amazon does. This is true for tech choices and system architecture. This is also true for recruiting software engineers.

Google Interview

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