ARTICLE

Zimpler Case Study

The Client

Zimpler is a Swedish financial technology company, enabling seamless bank-to-bank payments for merchants across a rapidly growing set of countries in Europe and beyond. Though its success is driven by an open and inclusive culture, finding the right people is always a challenge. This is where Lynchburg Collective comes in; we continue to place experienced consultants in roles that make a difference in Zimpler’s operations. 

Git Blame Donal

Any time you clone a service or a library at Zimpler and run git blame, you’re likely to see the same name over and over again: Donal Byrne. Lynchburg’s gentle giant is a Golang genius, having built large chunks of Zimpler’s boilerplate, and added his architectural flourishes to the service mesh that connects them.

Donal credits the positive atmosphere at Zimpler and his support at the Collective for allowing him to focus on the work. “We have a lot of helpful tools and resources at Lynchburg, so I don’t have to worry about timesheets or admin overhead.”

Donal lives and works from Öland, but stays connected with the Collective culture through Slack, video calls and regular company meetups. “I don’t get to see everyone half as much as I’d like. When I do it always feels like we just pick up where we left off. We have a great crew.”

Go-ing Deep

Rob began working at Zimpler with no experience in Golang, after over a decade building back-end services in Javascript and PHP. “It was a little intimidating when I started, knowing that on Monday, I was going to start a new job in a new culture, in a new industry with a new tech stack.” Lynchburg and Zimpler, however, had his back.

“I had so much support from day one, both from team members at Zimpler and my fellow Lynchburgers.” He credits one in particular: “Donal is a wizard with Golang and was really my mentor in the beginning. He was always available when I needed guidance or had a question.” 

Rob also found that sometimes experience trumps specific expertise: “I was new to Golang, but I wasn’t new to software engineering. So when, in my first week, we decided to start rebuilding a legacy service, I was able to contribute right away.”

Rob’s team was charged with re-engineering critical legacy systems written in Clojure. “The first system we had to redesign was pretty tough to maintain and understand, but the team already had some ideas of how they wanted the new service to work. I was able to dig deep into my years of experience and recommend an architectural pattern for the problem that turned out to be the perfect solution.”

Working in mob and pair sessions, Rob made substantive contributions to the design and code of the final service. “It really wasn’t hard to become a productive member of the team with all the resources around me.”

Growing Together with Our Clients

Senior consultant, Maria, has been on assignment at Zimpler since April 2022. Previously an object-oriented Java developer, Maria had extensive experience in software engineering and architecture in the automotive and defense industries, but like everyone here at Lynchburg, knew there was always more to learn. 

Through the Collective’s Grow Together program, we allow consultants to spend up to two days per month working toward a professional goal. This could be a technical certification or learning a new language or technology. Maria developed a plan that allowed her to deepen her proficiency in Golang, graph databases and a new service architecture.

“A new team member brought up the idea of hexagonal architecture because a service we were working on felt too complex and interconnected. We talked about the idea and I decided to make it part of my growth plan.” 

No sooner had Maria begun to experiment with hexagonal architecture– a testable, flexible and more maintainable way to build software– than she began to see opportunities to improve services at her assignment. “We started using the pattern in one service and little by little the whole team started to adopt it. It made our code a lot easier to test and less fragile.”

“The Grow Together program allowed me to learn this on my own and then bring it back when I had a full understanding. This allowed me to involve the team without overwhelming them.”

Hexagonal architecture has become an important tool in Maria’s arsenal and she has already started on a growth plan looking at graph databases to optimize business data structures.