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Rainforest

Remote Culture Tips From a Distributed Team

We're all remote workers today. There has been a ton of amazing information published by some of the leading remote companies about how to work remotely, but we haven't seen much that talks about what kind of company culture is necessary for remote work to thrive. Having done this for 8 years, I can confidently say the 'soft stuff' is as important as tooling and process. To that end, I asked our team (over Slack, naturally) to share their tips on how to thrive as a remote worker.

Replacing Recompose with React Hooks

Recompose is a React utility belt for function components and higher-order components that has been very useful to our frontend engineering team. After more than three years of working with it, we’ve identified a lot of pain points. In October 2018, the React team introduced Hooks which shipped with React v16.8 and provided an alternative to HOCs.

How to remove Recompose and replace with Hooks

In our last post, we explored the pros and cons of Recompose and why we decided to remove it from our codebase. This post includes the strategy we used to approach the large task of implementing that refactor. It’s important to note that this strategy was created to fit our specific situation and is not a one size fits all approach to removing Recompose. Specifically, it was intended to work with our large codebase that is modified by our devs daily.

A guide to running offsites for remote companies

Rainforest QA is a distributed team. We have been distributed for seven years, with have Rainforesters all over the world and a truly global culture. On this seven year journey we have learned many lessons on how to run a global company with a coherent culture. According to the team our offsites are the most impactful thing we do to drive our distributed culture. With that in mind, here are some of our tips and learnings after doing ~20 offsites in 5 years.

How We Moved from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine

In my last post I laid out our reasoning for moving from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other GCP services. Now I'll describe the actual migration process in detail. This isn't designed as a how-to guide for migrating from Heroku to GKE—Google has their own excellent tutorial for that—but rather a description of some of the challenges of migrating real-world production applications and how we overcame them.

Deep Dive into Rainforest Test Writing Service

We’ve made a lot of changes to our Test Writing Service over the past few months and it’s become the powerhouse of test creation for many Rainforest users. In this post, we’ll dive deep into how Rainforest Test Writing Service works, and how you can use it to scale up and streamline your test case management workflow.

3 Key Pillars of Building a Culture of Quality in Engineering

Building a high-quality product takes teamwork. Maintaining a best-in-class product while continually developing high-quality features and giving a stellar customer experience, takes a quality-driven culture. We teamed up with Invotra in this new guide, Building a Culture of Quality: How Teams Can Use Quality to Achieve Business Goals, to explore the strategy behind building a culture of quality.

3 Key Areas The Best QA Teams Focus On

In our recent poll on the health of the QA industry, we found that over half of all QA teams surveyed are not very confident in their ability to ensure a high-quality product. Having a high degree of confidence in your QA process is important, as it helps you ensure that every deployment goes smoothly and that resources are being allocated efficiently.