From our evolving platform to our growing team, a lot has changed since Blend launched eight years ago. Our main Blend blog has become a hub for all things consumer finance and technology, helping a wider range of financial institutions deliver better digital lending experiences. At the same time, we’ve realized that we need a little extra space for content that digs deeper into the technical details. So a couple of us from the engineering team have been working hard in the background to create an exciting new space specifically for engineering topics: Blend Engineering: Full Stack Finance.
There’s so much to learn about our talented, mission-driven engineering team that comes front-and-center in this blog. One unique factor is our engineering culture, which has been built on the principles of respect and a constant focus on improvement. We trust each other to do our best work; autonomy is central to the way we operate, as is an equal opportunity to make an impact. Each one of our teammates plays an integral part in solving complicated financial service problems, dramatically improving experiences for both institutions and customers, and ultimately bringing a software revolution to the antiquated financial services industry.
The hardworking, innovative spirit of our engineering team may be most evident in the actual development of this blog, which posed a fun challenge. With the creation of this blog, we’ve been able to green field an authoring collaboration experience based on the day-to-day tools we use to do our normal engineering work (GitHub and git, to be specific.) In the process, we found that these code review tools also work really well for reviewing blog posts and other non-code text contributions within a blog.
Here’s how we put code review tools to use:
- Having posts in git allows us to easily track who made what changes and when, as well as to revert changes and branch the blog based on points in the past.
- Pull Request tools in GitHub allow for a rich experience reviewing changes to any type of text, not just code. This enables us to create working action items, do structured review passes, and assign owners for follow ups.
- Lastly, having all of the blog’s content in code allows us to create an automatic publishing pipeline that can be used to push out new posts or make changes to existing posts with clear audits.
We’re pretty excited about the posts that we’ve been able to share so far. Here are some topics we’ve already written about that you can find on the blog:
