Gorrion

Can open-source also be a source of revenue? 💰

We’d argue that in this day and age building open-source products and running a company on top of those creates unparalleled opportunities.

So what is the key to success? Contrary to popular belief, you shouldn’t pick an existing SaaS solution and rebuild it as open-source. It might sound doable, but real, successful products are always born out of necessity.

The best example here is Cal․com – an open-source alternative to Calendly, but more importantly – an open scheduling platform.

The founder of Cal․com, Peer Richelsen, found himself in dire need of a more powerful scheduling tool than Calendly. None of the existing platforms worked for him, so he decided to build his own. As you can read from Cal․com’s blog: “The things we intended to do were fundamentally harder being a closed SaaS product than being open-source.” From day one, Cal․com was founded with the mission to connect 1 billion people by 2031. They fundamentally believe infrastructure software needs to be open, accessible, and here to stay.

Being open-source comes with its own set of trade-offs. Cal․com’s growth journey has been remarkable, driven by word-of-mouth and developer interest. However, open-source software (OSS) is known for the challenge of capturing generated value early on.

On the other hand, while a SaaS business can capture higher revenue per customer, it is ultimately limited by the number of people it can reach. Governments, healthcare, and other highly regulated industries not only prefer, but are often required to self-host. Open source makes this possible in the most secure and trusted way.

The belief is that SaaS infrastructure is only scratching the surface of the scheduling space. Industry leaders agree that the entire market is still in its infancy.
Competing head-to-head against existing market leaders as a SaaS company is seen as a fool's errand. That’s why Cal․com’s strategy is to operate in a fundamentally different category: open scheduling. To qualify as an open scheduling product, the software needs to be infrastructure-ready, open-source, accessible, and extensible. And Cal․com delivers.

Our office may be giving summer vibes, but our new intern is already hard at work! 💪

Good luck, Kuba, we hope you’ll have a fantastic time with us during your summer internship! 🏖️

We all make mistakes. Some of them break 8.5 million computers and are a wee bit more costly than others 😬.
But in the context of software development we need to understand that programmers write bad code all the time.

So what’s the key to avoid these costly mistakes?

🤖 Firstly: automate your processes. Whether it’s quality assurance by running unit, integration, E2E, and acceptance tests, or continuous integration – the code that reaches production should be reviewed by both humans and machines.

📅 Secondly: don’t deploy on Fridays. Fridays should not be the source of tears and sleepless nights, so just make sure you don’t deploy any code to production on Fridays. (Well, the hot fixes on broken code you deployed on Thursday don’t count.)

🔬 Thirdly, and in the light of the CrowdStrike disaster, most importantly: learn from your mistakes. The best way to learn from mistakes is a good, blameless post-mortem. What's that? It's an organized analysis of an incident that focuses on the real issue, not an individual’s faults.
The key here is to stay focused on the actions, not the people. You should identify the whats, the whys, and the hows to prevent future issues. You should try to emphasize learning and fixing things over punishment. Blameless post-mortems turn problems into opportunities to make things better in the future. They focus on finding honest solutions rather than blaming people.

What a day! Last Saturday we celebrated Gorrion’s 15th birthday (yes! fifteenth!) and let us tell you, it was a night to remember! 💃🕺

There were speeches, birthday gifts, lots of hugs and kind words, there was barbecue and dancing, and above all – there were the fantastic people that have been making Gorrion so great for all these years… and many more years to come! 🥳

Happy birthday to Gorrion and see you next year at our sweet sixteen! 🎂

P.S. Be sure to check our Instagram profile soon for even more photos from this fantastic event! 📸

Last month our CEO, Bartosz Wróbel, and our PO/PM Team Lead, Michalina Drozd, flew all the way to the beautiful island of Ireland to meet with our existing clients and discuss opportunities for new partnerships ✈️.

Among others, they met with our friends at Bioledger, FireCloud365, and ITUS Secure Technologies, but also visited local tech hubs, like theii.com, CoLab North West, and The AMP Growth Incubator.

And, luckily, they also found some time in their busy schedules to take some pictures! 📸

“Microservices are better than monoliths,” inexperienced software developers will often tell you. What they don’t know is that microservices architecture can quickly go south even for the most experienced, well-renowned teams and companies 📉. The best example comes from Amazon itself 🤯.

Amazon’s streaming service, Prime Video, uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) under the hood. Seems a pretty natural choice, right? What if we told you that Prime Video actually pays AWS for these services and that their initial architecture of defect detectors based on microservices and serverless was so ineffective they had to revert to monoliths? 🙊 Here’s the story.

In order to ensure superior viewing experience, Prime Video monitors every stream for quality issues and resolves them in real time. Initially, to trigger and launch their defect detection algorithms, they used the popular AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions.

This cost a fortune, as AWS Step Functions charges its users for every action (aka state transition) performed, of which in this case there were a lot. How many? Suffice it to say that Step Functions has a hard limit on the number of state transitions an account can perform and Prime Video reached that limit at around 5% of their expected load 😵.

So, they quickly changed their architecture from distributed microservices to a monolith application, running detectors in Elastic Container Service (ECS) Tasks. They kept the serverless part but abandoned microservices, achieving 90% lower bills 💰 and a potential to scale indefinitely 📈.

The lesson here is rather simple: don’t optimize prematurely. Or, as Marcin Kolny from Prime Video wrote: “Microservices and serverless components are tools that do work at high scale, but whether to use them over monolith has to be made on a case-by-case basis.”

Happy workiversary! 🎂 This time we celebrated Michalina and Damian on their third and fifth anniversary at Gorrion. We’re so lucky to have you both! 🥳

How do you slow down your app by 15% while also paying 8x more for its upkeep? 🙈🙉🙊 Well, here's a story.

Serverless is a way of managing your application in the cloud where the cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) is responsible for running your code by dynamically allocating resources it owns. Meaning: you don’t have to own and maintain the servers yourself. While this solution may seem ideal for many developers, project owners, and indeed entire companies, it also might go south pretty quickly if you’re not careful!

You might have heard about serverlesshorrors․com. If not, we do recommend it – it’s a great source of scary stories about serverless gone wrong 🫣. One of our favorites comes from Einar Eglisson, the creator of cardgames․io.

His application is a .NET Core API in Docker hosted on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk and running behind a CloudFront CDN. If you don’t understand what any of that means, our developers can assure you that this sounds like a traditional, solid application 👍.

Tempted by the promises of fast deployment and autoscaling, Einar migrated to Serverless Framework. For the curious reader: he ended up with AWS Lambda + API Gateway.

…and that’s when he found that this solution is 15% slower than his previous deployment 😵.

But wait, there's more! 🤦‍♂️ cardgames.io accepts around 10 million requests a day. Considering the pricing of API Gateway and AWS Lambda, Einar ended up paying eight times more than he would, had he stuck with an ESB deployment.

The takeaway? No, it’s not “be wary of serverless”! We still love serverless (most of the time). It’s: don’t touch any moving parts when the machine is running! 🦾

Pipes, valves, heaters, coolers, plugs and cables, heating, plumbing, electrical… and software? Yes! There’s a place where installers and developers can meet, exchange ideas, and innovate – and that place is Installershow!

We were there last week and it was an amazing opportunity to explore how software can make the heat, water, and energy sector more efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly!

The day has come! We are now receiving submissions for our annual summer internship! ☀️

Who’s it for?
University students from Gliwice area with basic understanding of JavaScript/TypeScript and
✅ Node.js if you are interested in backend development, or
✅ React, HTML, and CSS, if you are interested in frontend development

Sounds interesting? Go to our careers page to get all the deets! ➡️ https://www.gorrion.io/career/backend-frontend-development-intern/

Ah, the dreaded word: refactoring 😱. Our clients hate to hear it, we hate to say it (almost as much as we hate actually doing it!). And yet here we are – companies come to us with existing software that underdelivers and after a thorough audit we can only recommend one thing – rewriting the existing code to improve its efficiency.

It’s no fun for either party. Fishing for mistakes in someone else’s code and fixing them is a tedious and demanding task that developers absolutely hate. Probably as much as you hate paying twice for one thing and for time spent on improvements that are invisible to the eye.

So if we can all agree that we’d rather avoid the dread at all cost, what are the circumstances where there’s no other way but to refactor the code? In our experience, it boils down to these three cases:

🔓 Security
Security issues are a critical reason for rewriting your code, as not taking care of them may cause your customers to lose their most sensitive data – personal and financial information, or passwords. Such incidents naturally result in customers having lower trust in your service or even resigning from it, but they may also make you liable to legal consequences.

🎛️ Performance
If the app is crashing or slowing down – i.e. showing signs of performance issues – it may be because of bottlenecks, poorly optimized architecture and database queries, code duplicates, unnecessary computations and caching results, or outdated libraries and frameworks. Patching up these things can only take you so far and if there are underlying issues with architecture, a rewrite is inevitable sooner or later.

📶 Scalability
An architecture that works for an MVP may not necessarily work for a successful product at scale. If your development team didn’t consider that, refactoring may be the only solution to efficiently handle increased workload or numbers of users. Restructuring the code will allow the developers to introduce scalable solutions like stateless architecture, load balancing, microservices, concurrency, and parallelism.

If you ever had your car fixed or built a house then you know that if something sounds too cheap to be true then it probably is. This is also true of IT projects.

The newest article on our blog explains how it happens and what you're really giving up for that lower cost estimate.

Be sure to give it a read! ➡️

Buy cheap, buy twice – how low initial costs of IT projects can be misleading Suspiciously low initial cost estimations almost never correspond to the actual price of the project. This is true not only of IT, but also of other industries. If you’ve ever had to fix your car or tried to build a house, you know what I mean.

Exciting news! We're happy to share that Michalina Drozd is now our PO/PM Team Lead! 🥳

This is a new role at Gorrion, created to make it easier for all of us – our clients included! – to work together in sync. Michalina will be responsible, among other things, for:
🚀 finding new ways to improve our processes that benefit both delivery teams and our clients;
📆 high-level internal PO/PM workload planning, i.e. making sure the team has clarity what needs to be done across the company;
🤝 supporting our project owners in their daily work, as well as in professional growth.

And since she's beloved by the clients she's been working with until now, Michalina will continue to manage her current projects and work closely with your amazing teams as well, so don't fret! 😉

Congratulations, Michalina, we're super proud of you and excited to see you grow in this new, well-deserved role! 👏

We’re coming to Innovation Zero – the UK’s largest net zero congress! 🌿 Are you going as well? If you’d like to discuss how software development can help your company find innovative ways to fight climate change, be sure to catch up with our sales representative there!

And that’s a wrap! Yesterday we were at 4Developers – the biggest interdisciplinary IT festival in Poland!

A sizeable part of our team went to learn and network with other devs, but our one and only Dominik Guzy also had the opportunity to give a talk on when serverless stops making sense 👏.

Great job, 4Developers, as always! 🥳 See you next year! 👋

This time we’re on the lookout for a backend developer with AWS experience! 🔎 What else does the ideal candidate have?

🕓 At least 2-3 years of commercial experience in working with Node.js and TypeScript, as well as developing backend applications
📝 Proficiency in REST API, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, ORM (preferably Prisma/Drizzle), and Docker
🐈 Experience using NestJS in your previous projects
☁️ Familiarity with AWS and CI/CD
📝 Ability to write unit and integration tests
🌍 Good command of English (B2+) and fluency in Polish

In return, we can offer:
💰 13,000–18,000 PLN net / month (or employer costs in case of other forms of employment) for mid-level role
🗃️ your preferred type of contract (B2B, UZ [for students], UoP)
🌴 20 days of paid leave per year (B2B, UZ)
🏢 100% remote, hybrid, or stationary work at our office in Gliwice
🎓 training budget

As well as:
📢 conferences
🍻 monthly company events and integrations (on-site in Gliwice) and an annual team meetup in Zakopane
🦉 flexible working hours (they are really flexible)
🩺 sports card and private medical care
👯 budget for project celebrations
🚐 if you work remotely and want to visit our office, we have a budget to cover the travel expenses
📬 regular evaluations and 1-1 feedback sessions
🤝 referral program
☕ coffee, tea, and yerba
🎮 chillout and game room with PS4
🎙️ Gorrion Unplugged meetups

Sounds interesting? Learn more about the role and our company on our website ➡️ https://www.gorrion.io/career/mid%20backend-developer/

Another day, another ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review! This time from Macat Critical Thinking, who deliver critical thinking tools to employers and the education industry.

NuroKor Bioelectronics are revolutionizing health and well-being through non-invasive technologies. One of their products is EquiPod – an application for equine therapy.

The software Gorrion developed for EquiPod allows owners to remotely manage devices used to treat horse injuries through bioelectrical stimulation. The app can be connected to multiple devices simultaneously via Bluetooth and can not only control them, but also store data about their performance and, consequently, the animals themselves.

Learn more about this project on our website 👉 https://www.gorrion.io/portfolio/nurokor/

Happy Easter! 💐 We wish blissful holidays to all our clients, partners, and friends 🐣. Enjoy your rest and see you Tuesday! 🐇

Not three, not five, but EIGHT people celebrating their work anniversaries at Gorrion this time! 🤯 That must be a new record – one that we’re very proud of! 😍 Many happy returns to all of you! 🥳

Remember them? They used to be our interns, now they are full-fledged Gorrions! 🥳 Together with Megi the dog 🐕, Ola and Mateusz make three 👌 new additions to our team! Welcome onboard! 👋

We’re looking for a fullstack developer with Node.js & React! 🧐 Is that you? Let’s find out!

You should have:
🕓 minimum 2-3 years of commercial experience working with Node.js and TypeScript, as well as React
💻 experience with backend
🔀 knowledge of REST API, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, and Node.js ORM (preferably Prisma)
📝 familiarity with NestJS, Docker, AWS, and CI/CD, as well as the ability to write unit and integration tests
🌍 good command of English (B2+) and fluency in Polish
🙋‍♂️ experience working with clients
✅ ability to select the right technological and architectural solutions for projects
💡 willingness and ability to share your knowledge with others
🤝 basic knowledge of SCRUM (preferred)

In return you can expect:
💰 mid: 13,000–18,000 PLN net / month (or employer costs in case of other forms of employment)
🗃️ your preferred type of contract (B2B, UZ [for students], UoP)
🌴 20 days of paid leave per year (B2B, UZ)
🏢 100% remote, hybrid, or stationary work at our office in Gliwice
🎓 training budget
As well as:
📢 conferences
🍻 monthly company events and integrations (on-site in Gliwice) and an annual team meetup in Zakopane
🦉 flexible working hours (they are really flexible)
🩺 sports card and private medical care
👯 budget for project celebrations
🚐 if you work remotely and want to visit our office, we have a budget to cover the travel expenses
📬 regular evaluations and 1-1 feedback sessions
🤝 referral program
☕ coffee, tea, and yerba
🎮 chillout and game room with PS4
🎙️ Gorrion Unplugged meetups

Want to learn more? Go to our website and apply now! ➡️ https://www.gorrion.io/career/mid%20full-stack-developer/

Sláinte! Happy St. Patrick’s Day to our friends, clients, and partners in Ireland! ☘️

Is there anything more important than human life? Our client, FireCloud365, is on a mission to protect it through more secure and compliant fire protection systems. This means safer hotels, restaurants, factories, and warehouses 💪.

Gorrion helps FireCloud365 develop and manage an application for smart management of fire alarms, in which safety and compliance specialists can collect information about them via NFC or QR codes, generate checklists and reports, manage fire plans, and react to fire hazards.

Learn more about this project on our website 👉https://www.gorrion.io/portfolio/firecloud/

Approximately 2 million people suffer from workplace accidents in the construction industry every year. But there are companies who are committed to changing this! We are proud to introduce one of them, our new client – IQWear.

IQWear's Smart Helmet aims to solve the problem of insufficient supervision within the construction industry, increasing both safety and productivity. This hard hat equipped with smart sensors makes it possible to monitor the safety of the employees in real time. It also collects an advanced set of data on work productivity that can be used to increase efficiency and drive revenue.

IQWear has partnered with Gorrion to design and develop the application that will support this system. It's yet another instance where we work with a company operating in the rapidly growing field of industrial IoT. We hope that the Smart Helmet will soon become a standard in the construction industry! 👷

Do you remember Radek and Piotrek, our summer camp interns? They were the 2️⃣ we’ve picked out of over 💯 applicants who wanted to join us in our office for the summer 🍹⛱️☀️. And guess what? We were spot on! 🎯 Radek and Piotrek will be staying with us and taking on full-time roles now that their internship is ending! 🎉

Congrats, guys, we’re lucky to have you! 🤩