Tech at Powens does not stop at our product, it is completely part of our DNA and culture.

The technical functions represent today more than 63% of our employees and are organised in three departments:

• Product Department : in charge of the product roadmap, from construction to delivery of our products and functionalities
• Engineering Department : ensures the proper functioning and technical development of our products
• Operation Department : ensures availability of our products and internal applications and maintains high security standards.

Powens' technical teams work with Agile methods. They work on two-week sprints, with a set of rituals:

• Sprint planning : define priority features and assign backlog tasks to different team members
• Stand up meeting : synchronise on the progress, the distribution of tasks and identify any blockages
• Sprint review : review what has been completed during the sprint, what new releases have been made and what tasks need to be taken up in the next sprint
• Sprint retro : meeting to discuss our current processes and propose improvement solutions

We use Gitlab to store our code base and all our documentation

"We develop innovative products that allow our customers to imagine and create the financial services of tomorrow."

Find out more about his background and challenges in this interview

We have set up a specific onboarding programme to facilitate the integration of developers and other technical functions. This onboarding allows newcomers to familiarise themselves with our stack and tools:

• Introduction to internal development best practices
• Discovery of internal and external documentation
  
• Development of a CLI application in Python to learn how to integrate our APIs
  
• Training on web scraping using the Woob framework
  
• Various exercises on fake banking websites developed in-house
  
• Training on our infrastructure and back-end

"As a Lead, I have to guarantee the quality of our product which stems from both technical and human aspects."

Find out more about his background and challenges in this interview

Continuous improvement is an essential element at Powens. Code reviews are systematically carried out before the release. Our developers are made aware of the Code Review/Peer Review process to increase their skills.

Many projects are also carried out to bring the DevOps culture to life: automation, continuous development and deployment methods. We rely on recent technologies, such as Terraform and Argo for deployment. We also use Prometheus and Loki for monitoring and observability.

We have an internal team dedicated to improving our work practices. Indeed, our Tooling team is dedicated to the development of internal tools and is continuously looking to improve and automate our processes: scripts, bot, tests...

"There are multiple challenges: designing scalable and secure infrastructures, supporting developers on the transformation into containers of our applications and the provision of CI/CD tools.”

Find out more about his background and challenges in this interview

Powens was built thanks to the Woob framework and today we are involved in the development of FastAPI.

• Woob “Web Outside Of Browsers”

This technology was developed by Romain Bignon, co-founder of Powens, to collect financial data and invoices.

Woob is a Python framework dedicated to web scraping. It allows users to interact with websites, without forcing them to open websites in a browser. It provides well-defined APIs to interact with websites that are lacking them.

For more information: https://woob.tech/

•  FastAPI

FastAPI is a Python framework to quickly develop high performance APIs. The framework is designed to optimise the developer experience, making it quick and easy to build robust, production-ready APIs.

Our teams are invested in the development of the FastAPI project and we are using it to build the new version of our API. 

For more information:  https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/