Updates and articles from our Gearcitizens across the world
We’ve just said goodbye to a group of university students who spent 10 weeks interning with us working across different teams in Gearset. Hear from them on what the intern programme was like, and what they got up to at Gearset during their time with us.
“Hello! I’m Adam Parker (he/him), and I’m the Head of UX at Gearset. My role is split between managing the UX team and supporting project work on the platform.”
“Hello! I’m Alice Easey (she/her), and I’m one of the Development Managers at Gearset. I manage the engineering teams based in Gearset’s Cambridge office.”
Ben Scabbia is a Development Team Lead at Gearset based in our Cambridge office, and has been a software engineer for over 8 years. Ben’s taken a slightly non-traditional path to becoming a software engineer, which he shares in this article along with what a typical day looks like for him as a senior engineer at Gearset.
“I’m Luke Harris, Gearset’s VP of Customer Success, responsible for our global customer teams across Success, Support and Enablement. I’ve spent my career in SaaS businesses across a number of industries: Finance & ERP, Communications and MarTech with a primary focus on high-growth and scaling companies.
As part of our focus to deliver the leading Salesforce DevOps platform, we’re always looking for ways to improve our internal processes and continue to build a resilient system that serves our users. One of the ways we’re doing this is through our new observability team.
“My name is Jack Weatherly and I’m the Sales Director EMEA at Gearset, responsible for GTM strategy and delivery. I work hands-on with all of the teams in sales, from the beginning of the sales cycle with Sales Development Representatives, to active sales opportunities with Account Executives and Sales Engineers, out to specialised teams such as Renewals Managers. With a background in European Law, Gearset was my first professional role and I sold the product for 4 years before moving into management and leadership.”
Gearset is a product-led company built for developers by developers, so we know how important culture is to software engineers. As we’ve scaled the company, we’ve intentionally built on the strong foundations we created at the start: a world class engineering team, delivering meaningful value to our customers. We think the way we do engineering is pretty unique — but wouldn’t every tech company say that? To prove it, we take a dive into what makes Gearset’s engineering team different. Don’t just take our word for it — keep reading to hear directly what some of the engineering folks think!
“My name is Eamonn Boyle and I’m one of the Development Managers at Gearset. I run Gearset’s Belfast office which opened in April 2022, managing the engineering teams working out of there. I have about 20 years’ experience in the industry doing some form of software engineering, working in all sorts of areas including research, telecomms, hardware, consultancy and training.”
Introduction written by Chiara Gardner (she/they) with contributions from Jen Hicks (she/they), Vivian Huang (she/her), and an anonymous member of the Gearset team.
Our recent report What do tech talent want in 2023, co-published with Hackajob, delves into the needs and aspirations of tech talent. We asked those in a range of different tech positions, from Software Engineers to UX designers, what they love most about their job and company. In this article, we explore the key insights from the report.
Mark Allan is a Principal Software Engineer at Gearset with over 30 years industry experience, a Microsoft MVP, and founder of the Northern Ireland Developers conference. Bringing his vast industry expertise to Gearset as a Principal Software Engineer in our growing software hub in Belfast, Mark shares his journey to this role, and what a typical day at Gearset looks like.
On Sunday 5th March, a team of over 35 Gearcitizens, friends, and family took on the challenge of running 13.1 miles around our home town Cambridge to complete the Cambridge Half Marathon, with a whole host of team members from all over Gearset cheering them on.
Back in April, we opened our product development hub in Belfast, the hometown of our CEO Kevin Boyle. Since then, the team has grown rapidly and the influence they’ve had on our product and customers has been phenomenal.
Gearset have been crowned the winners of the Best Companies Special Learning and Development Award 2022! The recognition of winning an award is always great but this award was based on feedback from our employees, which makes it even more special.
Exciting news! The results of the Best Companies awards 2022 are in, and Gearset has been recognised with an array of awards: 4th Best Mid-Sized Company to work for in the UK 4th Best Tech Company to work for in the UK 3rd Best Company to work for in the East of England Learning and Development Special Award
In March, I accepted an enticing offer, along with two of my future colleagues, to be the first members of the customer support team at Gearset’s Chicago office. The offer came with a unique opportunity: to complete onboarding at Gearset’s global headquarters in Cambridge, England.
The reality of life as a software engineer can vary greatly depending on the company you work for. Software engineering job ads and careers pages may sell companies with their best foot forward, but the reality of working in that company might not turn out as expected. At Gearset, transparency is part of who we are. Rather than us just telling you what engineering at Gearset is like, we’ve got two of our talented engineers, Catherine Bacon and Matt Guy, on hand to give their perspectives.
This year marked 50 years of London Pride. My husband marched in the parade, alongside thousands of others, to celebrate the great leaps that have been made since that first protest in 1972. I was there too, having a joyous experience in the city.
To celebrate the milestone of Gearset hitting its 5-year anniversary this year, we wanted to take a trip down memory lane to share some insights from the early days of Gearset, and how those formative years helped shape the company you know today.
It was Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK last week, which provided a great chance to shine a spotlight on this important topic and consider what more we could be doing to support each other. At Gearset, prioritising and supporting our team’s wellbeing and mental health is always a priority. We care about each other, and feel that no Gearcitizen should ever feel they’re alone.
Earlier this month, 9 members of Gearset embarked on a hackathon. We rented a house in the British countryside, away from the distractions of daily working life, and focused our energy on building one specific feature. At the end of 5 days, we hoped to have a working prototype that we could show our customers, and ship it shortly after.
Since launching in 2015, Gearset has seen its customer base and headcount grow year on year. Today, Gearset’s DevOps solution is used by thousands of Salesforce developers worldwide, and the company has offices in Cambridge (UK) and Chicago. To support our continued growth, we’re pleased to announce we’re expanding our global presence by opening a new office in the tech hub of Belfast.
Today is International Women’s Day and here at Gearset we’re celebrating not only everything to do with women in Salesforce, but specifically women at Gearset!
On Wednesday the 9th Feb, we welcomed Customer Success professionals from far and wide to the first Customer Success Network Café Cambridge at The Bradfield Centre in Cambridge.
Anyone familiar with B2B SaaS companies is likely to have come across a number of CSMs. But in some quarters the role is relatively new, and it’s still common to come across misconceptions about the part CSMs have to play in their customers’ journey. In case of doubt, we’re talking here about Customer Success Managers - not Certified Scrum Masters!
As 2021 drew to a close, we decided to try something at Gearset we haven’t done for a while: a polish week. What is a polish week you may ask? It’s not a Poland-themed week, in case that’s how you read it at first — which some of us did! The idea is that for one whole week our developer team pauses their long-term development work and makes lots and lots of small changes to make the lives of our customers better.
This summer, six university students took on a 10-week internship at Gearset. I’m the marketing intern, and the other five interns are software engineers. As our internship comes to a close, we thought we’d have a final catchup to reflect on our time at Gearset and share our experiences!
Starting just five years ago, Gearset has grown to become the most widely used DevOps solution for Salesforce with thousands of customers all around the world. It’s been an exciting journey, and we’re just getting going. Up to this point, we’ve been based almost entirely in Cambridge, UK. Now, we’re heading stateside and opening our US head office in Chicago 🇺🇸
There are lots of approaches to delivering new versions of software. You can release big bundles of features all at the same time as a whole new version. Alternatively, you can release individual features one at a time, and not worry too much about version numbers. Or you can go even further by releasing features in multiple slices, iterating as you go. As with everything in software development, all of these approaches have pros and cons.
Releasing changes to production is scary. All sorts of things can go wrong. What if that new feature you just implemented contains a bug that you didn’t spot in testing? Or maybe that bug you fixed causes an issue in an unrelated area? Maybe there’s a performance issue that doesn’t show up until you hit production workloads?
Taking on a group of new interns might seem like the last thing a company would be thinking about during a global pandemic, but despite all of the difficulties that Covid-19 has brought with it, that’s exactly what Gearset has done. Four software engineering interns and one marketing intern (me) all joined the team in July for a period of ten weeks. We decided to get together and share our experiences, explaining what life is like as an intern at Gearset.
We’re proud of our engineering culture here at Gearset. We’ve built the sort of team we all want to work in: open, collaborative, laser-focused on quality, pragmatic, and unencumbered with unnecessary process. This great culture brings a whole host of benefits both to us as engineers, and our users. It enables us to iterate quickly, build the right things at the right times, and deliver real, tangible product improvements week in week out - all without ever compromising on uptime and reliability.
It’s just been announced that Gearset is one of the best places to work in the UK 🎉🤩🚀! We’re super thrilled with the award from Great Places To Work (GPTW) recognizing Gearset as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces. To enter the GPTW ranking for the first time ever and make it into the top ten for our category (small organizations) is a real honour. Huge congratulations and a big thank you to all of the Gearset team 🙏 for making our workplace culture one of the best!
Several weeks ago, 8 members of the Gearset team set off to a secluded cottage (albeit a very big one) located in the beautiful Berkshire countryside, for a week long hackathon.
As the name “Hillside Hackathon” may suggest, some of the Gearset team have embarked upon an epic journey of feature exploration in the beautiful British countryside. It might not sound quite as epic as trailblazing up a mountain, but the UK’s countryside is a little more quaint than that on the other side of the pond!
Microsoft’s VSCode has come along leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, both in functionality and popularity. One of my favourite things about it is that it’s open source, which means that not only can you check out the source code for yourself, you can contribute, too!
When it comes to the design, implementation, and release process, life’s been a whole lot easier working on Gearset than perhaps any previous project. There’s been no single defining moment, but if you asked me to pick the most significant of the contributing factors, I’d have to go for the involvement of users earlier in the design process.