Updates and articles from our Gearcitizens across the world
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!
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.
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!