What does being API first mean?

 Posted on July 17, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  816 words  |  Juha Ristolainen (Chief Technology Officer)

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. [Read More]

Looking Back at GopherCon Europe 2023

 Posted on July 7, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  878 words  |  Geoffrey Teale (Head of Developer Experience)

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. [Read More]

Sponsoring GopherCon Europe 2023

 Posted on May 26, 2023  |  2 minutes  |  223 words  |  Geoffrey Teale (Head of Developer Experience)

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. [Read More]

Tribe workshop with Lego® Serious Play®

 Posted on May 15, 2023  |  6 minutes  |  1189 words  |  Katja Sommer (Head of Delivery)

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. Facilitating workshops like the one I’ll be describing below is an exciting and important extension of my work. [Read More]

Mob programming builds better remote development teams

 Posted on March 2, 2023  |  6 minutes  |  1203 words  |  Niko Will (Tech Lead)

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. [Read More]

The Philosophy of Technical Documentation at Upvest

 Posted on January 31, 2023  |  14 minutes  |  2892 words  |  Geoffrey Teale (Head of Developer Experience)

Geoff philosophising API Portal Screenshot Doctave Dashboard 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. [Read More]

Publishing our OpenAPI Spec and Documentation

 Posted on January 25, 2023  |  6 minutes  |  1278 words  |  Geoffrey Teale (Head of Developer Experience)

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. In 2022 we: gained the BaFin licenses required for us to work with customers. secured $42M series B financing. signed our first Investment API customer and supported them in developing the first commercial project built with the Upvest API. [Read More]

My Experience as a Product Engineering Intern

 Posted on November 28, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  437 words  |  Monika Ghimire (Product Engineering Intern for Payments)

I started my engineering internship late last summer when we were still located at Torstraße. My first day began with a quick tour of the office space and a warm welcome lunch with the team. I was onboarded into countless slack channels, ran through tools and applications and skimmed through documentation and checklists. My onboarding was not only exciting but also overwhelming given the surge of information I was sinking into. [Read More]

Talking DevX on 'Tech In Ten'

 Posted on November 18, 2022  |  1 minutes  |  96 words  |  Geoffrey Teale (Head of Developer Experience)

A word in your ear? Back in the summer, I had a call with Ben Malloy to talk about Developer eXperience. That chat is now available as the latest episode of Venturi’s ‘Tech in Ten’ podcast. Tech in ten podcast If you’d like to hear my off-the-cuff remarks about what Developer eXperience is about, how it relates to other parts of technology leadership and what it means specifically to Upvest, then check it out here: [Read More]

Our Core Values

 Posted on October 26, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  781 words  |  Juha Ristolainen (Chief Technology Officer)

We are on a mission to make investing as easy as spending money. We want to enable the next hundred million people to better prepare for their future by democratizing access to capital markets and investing. We do this by helping our clients build great products that lower the barrier of entry for most folks. We figure out what is important on our journey towards that mission by using Objectives and Key Results to help us focus on the most important things at any given time. [Read More]