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| Sakis Kaliakoudas | Simon Attard | Adrián López |
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Why we built Caribou
We have been software engineers for over a decade and we know how important it is to keep codebases in good shape and to pay back technical debt. We’ve seen first hand how this impacts the business agility and its ability to compete; not to mention engineer productivity and morale.
Despite the importance of technical quality, it is not always easy to prioritise technical projects and find large chunks of time dedicated to pay back technical debt. The only way we’ve been able to keep our codebases in good shape was to do improvements continuously while working on features.
This approach worked very well for us. As we started doing it with a larger team, we realised we needed a better way to manage these technical improvements. Specifically, we needed a way to understand what are the improvements being done across the codebase, what is their status and who are the engineers doing the improvements. This would help us ensure we are prioritising the right improvements and also that we are recognising the engineers for their work. This is extremely important to build a culture of technical excellence in the team.
This is why we’ve built Caribou. We hope that we can help other engineering teams around the world improve their codebases continuously, recognise engineers who contribute to this and create a culture where code quality is rewarded!
Why we chose the name “Caribou”
Caribou is a lovely animal that is known for performing one of the largest land migrations in the animal kingdom. There are herds of Caribou in Alaska and Canada traveling up 1,350 kilometers per year! Given that our tool is about software migrations and Caribou does land migrations, we thought that it was a good enough coincidence to raise awareness about this beautiful animal!
