Our Tech Team

How we work

We believe that great people make the difference. A small tech team filled with smart and passionate people can accomplish more than an average team ten times their size.

The first version of MyBuilder (Buildersite), was launched in 2006 after 14 months of work. When we joined MyBuilder as the first in house tech team, we completely rebuilt the system in 10 weeks - with 3 people. It was a vast improvement, with better usability, almost no bugs, better performance, and it was much easier to maintain.

User-centred approach

We believe in building something useful. This concept permeates our culture, and the interface is the most visible example. We try to understand the people that use MyBuilder in every possible way. We talk to them on a daily basis, and invite them into the office to test new interfaces and features. We a/b test constantly, and need to do more. We strive to constantly improve our understanding of both the business priorities and those of the individual users. We wrestle with trade-offs in respect to SEO, usability, maintainability and scalability. Building a great application that is easy to use, functions as a business, solves people's problems, scales well and is easy to maintain is a huge challenge, but that's what gets us out of bed in the morning.

Agile

Over the past two years, our development methodology has evolved into a system that works well for us. Honed from exploring various flavours of agile, we believe that our way of working helps us get the right things done at the right time. We are committed to constant re-evaluation and improvement of the way we work.

OO

We believe that object oriented programming is the natural way to build our system - it allows us to model the real world in our code. We design our core libraries, data and model structures using appropriate design practices which helps us to rapidly evolve the website with minimal complications or bugs. We strive to keep a high level of code quality which not only keeps us happy and productive, but also helps the business to succeed.

Symfony - a PHP framework

Symfony rocks! In our opinion symfony is by far the best implementation of an OO framework in PHP, making it a natural environment for us to work in. Mature, stable and well documented. It allows us to develop our system super fast while maintaining terrific quality code, it is the perfect match for us. It takes care of the CRUD allowing us to put our heads together to solve the complex problems.

We are very proud of our custom database migration plugin. When we started out there was no database migration system that worked with PostgreSQL, so we wrote our own! We hope to be able to release this back to the community soon.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL was the best match for our needs, it offered advanced features coupled with a high level of data integrity.

To ensure data integrity we take advantage of PostgreSQL’s triggers and functions by pushing some of our business logic into the database. For example we use triggers to log data changes, which makes it more consistent and reliable. Postgres has allowed us to make the site faster by taking advantage of query optimisation features such as it’s geospatial functions and partial indexes.

We Love

Macs, debian, netbeans, apache, our 237 sq ft of whiteboards and Lily Allen.

We're looking for great PHP developers, front end Developers & UI designers to join our team.
If you think you're right for MyBuilder, we'd love to you!