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.

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.

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:

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. Teams have a lot of autonomy in figuring out how they contribute to the overall company objectives in each quarter by defining their own Key Results.

Thank you, attendees!

I want to start by thanking everyone who took the time to join us at our Upvest HQ last night for the GDG Berlin Go meetup. It was my very great pleasure to meet so many of you, and share some pizza and drinks with you. I speak for everyone at Upvest when I saw that we’re glad to be able to support the community in this way, and we’re sure we’ll be doing it again.

The event

We’re proud to announce, that we’ll be hosting the GDG Berlin Golang meetup at 19:00 CEST on the 12th of October, 2022 at our offices in Berlin.

At Upvest we always start with the question: “Why?”. Every engineer first needs to understand the problem we are trying to solve, and why it is important to our clients and us. Only once they’ve done this can they move on to thinking about solutions for the problem. Every engineer needs to have a product mindset. That’s why we call these people Product Engineers.

Every day, we work closely with our counterparts in the product team to deliver value to our clients. The product team figure out what to build and why. The engineering team figure out how to build it, who builds it and how long it might take.

Welcome to Upnest!

Just the other day, I came back from a meeting and found that shiny new, USB-C charging monitors had magically appeared on all desks. Roman, our TechOps Engineer, delivered.

“Wait what”, I hear you saying, “you didn’t have any monitors for your people?”

We didn’t. We just moved into our new office a week before…

Upvest grew from about fifty people in 2021 to over a hundred in summer 2022, sixty of them engineers. We recently finished our Series B financing and will grow much further, so we had to leave our cozy yet small office on the hip Torstraße in Berlin’s Mitte district.

Your technical interview at Upvest

So you made it to the first major stage of our interview process? Great, our tech folks are happy to meet you soon!

As you may know by now, we will have a 30 Minute-long live coding session as part of the interview. You won’t need to complete any tasks or do any homework before the session but, we can offer you these hints to give you a head start and ensure a smooth, fun session.

For the final 3 days of July, we were proud to be platinum sponsors of GopherCon Europe 2022.

This year, the conference had significance beyond its usual status as the central event of the European Go community year. It was the first time that the conference could be an in-person event since the outbreak of COVID-19. Though most of us have already grown accustomed to interacting in real life again, you could feel what it means to the broader community to be able to gather like this. I hope that a little of that spirit filtered through to those who participated remotely too.