What I’ve learned at Arkency and why I am leaving

The story I’d like to tell you starts at the beginning of 2012. At that time I’ve run my side project Konfeo – event registration and management system. After three years of working on that, first partially and then full time, I’ve decided that I need to split my time to enhance and diverse income sources. I joined Arkency in 2015.

It was a very good decision. I’ve joined to quite large legacy Rails project with a complex domain. I’ve started to cooperate with more developers working on the project and with the client directly. I’ve learned how to use new tools like Heroku, MongoDB, Sidekiq with its pros and cons.

Arkency is known for its Domain-Driven design approach to work with Rails legacy apps. I’ve learned a lot of that architecture and started to use that design in my work. I even wrote a post on our blog about one of DDD tools: repositories.

The style of work at Arkency is very good planned. We use Trello with Kanban like process. Even most complicated features are easy to accomplish because we split each feature into tiny tasks and work with one baby step at a time approach. The work is processing with remote and async style. It means that we don’t need to work at client’s place and at client’s time. All communication in the project and in the company is doing via Slack and Trello asynchronously. The one synchronous moment in a week is our Friday weekly meeting but it is also recorded and may be consumed in an async way.

There are at least two interesting and important habits I’ve learned at Arkency. The first one is Monday security update (thanks Paweł). Every Monday I update my all projects and infrastructure. For code, I use tools like bundle-audit and bundle outdated. For servers, I update packages and apply security patches.

The second habit is starting from the middle approach (thanks Andrzej). It’s like MVP for every task. The work should be time-boxed, shippable and done with next iterations in mind. There is a proverb for this approach: “done is better than perfect” :)

So the question is why am I leaving such great company? As I said at the beginning my plan was to enhance and diverse income sources. After 3 years and around 2.500 hours of work, I had to decide what should be my next step. I had two challenging projects to work on and both projects need more and more attention. Additionally, I’ve started to practice Aikido a few months ago and feel more need to no rush myself and have some time to develop my inner peace.

I’ve decided to go full time with my own SaaS business Konfeo which is profitable more and more each month. Is the decision good? Time will show…