What is PHP? PHP is a programming language that is used by Reward Gateway to create many of our products. Much like software, a programming language can be upgraded to provide the following: More stable and faster performance New syntax and programming features Security and other critical bug fixes Why the change? PHP 8 was released … Continue reading We’ve upgraded our programming language to PHP 8
On 23 November, the week of Black Friday and our busiest of the year, Reward Gateway suffered a critical database cluster issue. This caused a complete outage of our service for 29 minutes. This outage was not as a result of a change made by our Operations or Engineering team, but due to a race … Continue reading A Galera Replication Race Condition
Several years ago our blogging tool undertook a major redesign. The old version had a number of problems but the most prominent and the ones that came up too often were related with narrow content area and small text size for the viewing experience, and too many clicks and a long journey before you even … Continue reading The evolution of a blogging tool
A couple of years ago we started making the platform more social. We went on that journey because we listen to the HR professionals who rely on us every day to make the world a better place to work. We started the discovery process, did some initial mockups and figured out we have a bigger … Continue reading The difference between user ACCOUNT and PROFILE
‘Shifting left’ has had a massive impact on modern software development practices. We should try to fix bugs earlier (often shown on the left) in the development lifecycle, because it is easier and cheaper. This means that it is worth trying to identify them earlier too. A graph of attention to quality at different stages … Continue reading How we use linting, static and dynamic analysis
Last month we released our Smart Spending Extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. This is built using Typescript This is not our first attempt at delivering an extension. We had developed prototypes as native Firefox plugins (using XUL) and as COM extension objects. We even launched some but withdrew them after a … Continue reading Developing a modern browser extension
Reward Gateway breaks down their winning formula On 10th October 2019, in a private box at Wembley Stadium, five industry professionals with 60+ years of experience between them, smiled and nodded as they judged a presentation. Sevil Rahimova ticked all the boxes for them as she spoke about Reward Gateway’s Mission to Make the World … Continue reading How to win by using customer feedback and insight in 6 Steps
Over the last several years Product and Engineering have set a course to improve the accessibility of our platform. This year we've worked together with the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) in the UK to make sure that their employee benefits platform was fully accessible for users regardless of their visual acuity. Most of the improvements … Continue reading Accessibility Awareness Day
When building products we always start with asking why. Finding the real needs of our clients is a prerequisite to building products and features that are useful, serve people's needs and even bring delight. We knew for some time that our reports and the usage data we provide needed to improve. To better meet clients' … Continue reading Analytics Dashboards designed for user needs
We've been recruiting for a number of roles in Engineering and as with every time we recruit, we’ve got that dreaded technical exercise to think about. Over recent years I’ve been heavily involved in our Engineering recruitment. I’ve met countless people through this, screened dozens of CVs, assessed people against our values, and had to … Continue reading The dreaded technical exercise
