Hint Health

We work in two week cycles. Each cycle begins with a meeting to discuss which engineers will be working on which projects and to discuss time estimates. We do retrospectives after each cycle and demo new features at our company all-hands. Engineers typically work closely with product to spec out the features in a project and break each one down into small, releasable pieces of work. Engineers will often work together to come up with the technical design, then divide and conquer the components. Pairing is required for new team members and for complex areas of the code, however most engineers tend to work independently. We use BDD for our backend code and rely heavily on our test coverage to catch regressions, making large-scale refactors possible (though still a bit scary). When a feature (or partial feature) gets completed, the branch gets pull requested to master and the code is deployed to it's own review app. Once the feature is QA'd, code reviewed and product reviewed it gets merged to master and immediately deployed to production. We often deploy to production several times a day and make heavy use of feature flags until a feature is ready for GA.

Most of our technical challenge is in building a complex application that supports the needs of our customers, including features around messaging, enrollment, billing, utilization tracking and reporting, across a rapidly growing customer base.

We are reaching the limits of what we can handle within a Rails monolith and will be relying more heavily on message systems, asynchronous processing and data warehousing to address the scaling requirements over the next year.