As you might have already seen on our careers page, we have what’s called a ProdEng (which stands for Product Engineering) department at Upvest. If you’re not yet familiar with the term, don’t worry. This blog post is an opportunity for you to familiarise yourself with it. If you already know what Product Engineering means, this post may still provide valuable insights about how we define it as one of our core engineering values at Upvest, and how our product engineering department works.

The Academy of Games

Between the 12th and 16th of August this year, the Leonore Goldschmidt School, in Hannover, was taking part in the city’s 10th annual “Akadamie der Spiele” (Acadamy of Games).

We are thrilled to announce the release of our Postman Collection for the Investment API! This powerful tool streamlines integration of our investment solutions into your applications, making it easier for developers to access and leverage our API’s full potential.

What is the Upvest Investment API?

The Upvest Investment API provides a comprehensive suite of functionality for building any investment experience. We provide seamless access to critical financial information and trading capabilities, ensuring that financial institutions can build sophisticated investment solutions with ease for their end users. See our website for more details.

At Upvest we are an API-first (in fact, API-only) company. We build robust and scalable software infrastructure for investment and banking. We expose our software, via our Public API, to clients who in turn integrate with our platform to provide their end users with investment products as part of their own offering.

We don’t build apps or end-user products ourselves, we provide capabilities for others to do so. We do have some internal user facing apps to facilitate our own operations, but we consider ourselves an API-company. What does this mean?

Wow! What an event GopherCon EU 2023 was. We returned to sponsor for a second year, and I’m so glad we did.

Last year’s GopherCon EU was a triumphant return with the spectre of a pandemic and lockdowns still fresh in our minds. This year’s GopherCon EU spread its wings with more speakers and more attendees. Enough attendees that it was necessary to set up an outdoor viewing area where people who couldn’t find a seat in the hall could watch the main stage live-streamed to a video screen. There was even a parallel track running in the Trödelhalle, just around the corner from the Festsaal where the main event happens.

Upvest are once again proudly sponsoring GopherCon EU 2023!

We had such a great time last year we were sure we’d be back. … and back we are. We’ll be in attendance on the two conference days, the 28th and 29th of June. This year we’re not only Gold Sponsors, but we’re also sponsoring diversity places at the conference. Upvest shares a vision of inclusiveness and diversity with GopherCon and we couldn’t think of a better way to reflect both than and our deep love of Go. In the best possible sense, we’re putting our money where our mouth is.

At Upvest we give a good amount of thought to how to foster team collaboration. In this spirit, I recently facilitated a workshop using Lego® bricks for our newly formed Investment and Custody Solutions tribe.

About my role

As Head of Delivery, I work with all of Upvest’s Product Engineering tribes, typically on topics such as OKRs, Team Health Checks, or ensuring our Engineering efforts are compliant.

TL;DR

Are you working in a remote and distributed team and you have issues with your team culture, knowledge sharing and/or productivity because of too many context switches? Try out remote mob programming!

Hybrid work

At Upvest we have a hybrid working environment which allows employees to work remotely and if they wish to, visit one of our offices. I joined the company in the middle of the pandemic when working from home was the default for most companies. However, this did not really change much after the offices were opened up again. We are still allowed to work from wherever we wish (as long as it works for the team and matches compliance and other regulations). While this has many advantages, it has some drawbacks too. The most significant ones for me are more difficulty sharing knowledge and the lack of social interaction with colleagues. As a people manager, leading a team of four people, and at the same time working almost 100% remotely, it is even more important to me.

Technical Documentation at Upvest

The product engineering teams at Upvest were already doing a good job of writing product documentation before I started at Upvest in July of 2022. That’s a testament to Upvest’s commitment to finding “product-minded” engineers and supporting them with dedicated “Product Managers”. I can’t stress enough how important that is to our outcomes. Despite this, I spent a lot of time and effort over the last six months, working on documentation. Not specifically writing documentation, but mainly defining the processes, responsibilities and tooling around the documentation and attending to the implementation of all this.

More than just a milestone

Sometimes life at Upvest seems like one long stream of milestones and reasons to celebrate. If you follow our social media you’ve probably grown used to a fairly continuous stream of exciting news and developments - last year was a huge year for us.