It is 3 months before the year ends. The big question ringing our minds is what are our milestones so far? ROAM tech team strives to make a huge impact across the brands with a bigger picture in mind; to become Africa’s most user-centric marketplace.
One of our highlights this year was hosting the ever first ROAM wide leadership summit on the 17th – 20th July 2018. This was an exciting period for us as we got a chance to interact with leaders from other countries. Happy to share an article about the summit. We are looking forward to hosting more of these summits in the future.
As was announced early in the year, parts of South Africa was experiencing the worst drought in almost 100 years. This had gone to the extent of local authority planning on turning off all water supply by April if the situation got worse. Since then we are glad for the rainy season, most importantly, good rainfall for the first time in the last three years! Dams around the city, which were near empty in February, are now all at over 60%. We are still under huge water restrictions to limit usage, but we are all breathing a sigh of relief and feeling optimistic for more rain in the coming weeks. Finally, we have successfully dodged a massive water crisis! We believe none of us will ever complain about rainy days ever again! 🙂
Exciting to announce, we have a brand new department: Group Engineering (GE)! Dylan Harbour, originally from the Jobs team, has become the Chief Technology Officer for this department. The team is growing and currently, we are hiring new Developers. Dylan has been engaging with ROAM Developers to understand the current pain points and ideas for improvements, as well as working with DevOps on new infrastructure changes and requirements. GE will be hosting a front end technology workshop with an aim to research new technology, patterns and trends in the Laravel and wider software engineering world.
Lastly, we are now “verticalized”! We are not sure if this a real word or one we have made up, either way, to us this means we are in the process of creating specialised, self-sufficient, multi-disciplinary teams in each vertical namely; jobs, cars, property and horizontals. Each vertical is now slightly larger, but also packing a much bigger punch.
