Inside Symbiote

Continuous learning and knowledge sharing are key aspects of day to day life at Symbiote and Insights are an opportunity for us to share that knowledge with the community.

Insights

3 MIN READ

Our 4-day work weeks: so far, so good ...

By Amanda Brown

The Symbiote team talk about what life's like with a 4-day work week.

1min read

Yes, Symbiote supports the Voice to Parliament

By Marcus Nyeholt, Owen Windsor

We believe a Yes vote will recognise 65,000 years of indigenous connection to this land, establishing a practical path to better outcomes for First Nations people.

2 MIN READ

Top 3 tips for coaching your colleagues

By Justin Matthies

Here's what it's like to coach colleagues within a company with a flat management structure.

"Coaching is a lot like a game of Jeopardy. The correct answer is usually a question."

3 MIN READ

From hairdresser to software developer – diversity in our development teams is a strength

By Kandice Stern

From hairdresser to software developer. Past career experiences give our teams the edge.

2 MIN READ

4-day working week in a high performing team

Let's talk about the importance of trust in software development, the attraction of a 4-day a week role, and why I love learning and sharing skills.

3 MIN READ

What do cats and automation have in common?

By James Mudie

Wondering what containerisation is about? Interested in automation in software, what a DevOps engineer does, cats ...? These are a few of my favourite things.

2 MIN READ

I love to break things – that’s what makes me a great software tester

By Priti Padmawar

My job as Symbiote’s Quality Assurance analyst, is to try to break things so our developers can fix them to deliver a high quality product.

3 MIN READ

How to choose the right people to make your integrated usability testing a success, even on a budget

By Rachel Kelly

Our usability testing process is fast, highly effective and budget-friendly. We carefully select the right people and they give us all kinds of useful information that’d be missed with a large-scale approach.

3 MIN READ

Celebrating International Women's Day every day

By Amanda Brown

March 8 is International Women’s Day – a day to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. Here are the practical ways Symbiote supports women.

3 MIN READ

Tips for planning and executing larger engineering epics

By Chris Kelly

Here's how we managed the early planning stage of a complex web development project.

5 MIN READ

Our five best software test and quality assurance practices in the project lifecycle

By Sakina Abedi

These are the top 5 best software testing and quality assurance practices we follow at Symbiote and how they improve our relationships with our customers, our internal processes and relationships, and the software we make.

3 MIN READ

Personal personalisation

By Marcus Nyeholt

We’re advocates for creating smart, ethical websites that inform and assist, rather than persuading or even tricking people, and that don’t store or sell visitor data. We even wrote an open source module in Silverstripe that lets you personalise your site for visitors, so they can remain anonymous and store some personalisation data on their own device, to make your site more useful during their future visits.

3 MIN READ

Website accessibility is about inclusion - and it should be standard, not extra

By Nathan Barry

Designing and coding websites to make them accessible makes them better for all kinds of users and technology.

3 MIN READ

Why should you care about the passwords you use (and re-use) online?

By Mansi Sheth-Parmar

You might have heard that we should use long passwords containing a mix of letters, numbers and symbols. But how does anyone remember complex passwords? Isn’t it OK to use the same password on unimportant sites?

1 MIN READ

Sharing job-seeker assistance software makes sense for government departments

By Owen Windsor

It makes sense for government departments to share software. We created a tool to help job seekers answer application questions persuasively – and it was easily modified to suit a different group of users.

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