Project Bread - The Most Wholesome Experience

Efficiency Unleashed for Successful Product Development… but how?

At Caravel Labs we have been continuously improving our AI capabilities, and this serves as a paper from one of our engineers about that subject.

Unlocking the potential of your Data using Knowledge Graphs

No, Serverless is Not Dead: Why Serverless Architecture remains a Viable Option for Scalability, Reliability, and Affordability.

Welcome to Caravel Labs' Sunrise Internship Program 2023 

Caravel Labs is now B Corp Certified! We have always been committed to positive social impact and fair employment and sales practices, and we are proud to now be formally recognized as a member of a community of business which is leading transformation of the global economic system for good. 

Our B Corp certification status demonstrates our commitment to our values of customer empathy, equitable and fair pay for our employees, and high-quality ethically-built products. 

Caravel Labs is now B Corp Certified!

Developing and nourishing tech-talent in Brunei with @Gromida

High Performance Software Delivery in Brunei - Grominda Podcast

At Parental Care India, we provide personal care services for seniors by visiting their residences. So, we must keep track of the appointments and information related to them diligently. We used to maintain this information in diaries and notebooks. It was getting difficult to share the right information at the right time when an associate is visiting the residence of a member. So, the business problem we were trying to solve was sharing information for visit scheduling for associates. We wanted to organize and automate the visit scheduling and visit report submission processes via a collaborative platform. Sharing information via emails, phone calls and WhatsApp chats was getting difficult and error prone. 

Client Story - Parental Care India

Legacy Code Rocks Podcast: Building Durable Software

Conversation with Ruthi Moore, retired Director of the Visiting Nurse Program and Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society hosted by Ashu Chatterji

World Health Day 2023

Inspiring the Future: The Impact of Engineers Sharing Knowledge and Expertise with Young Students 

Founder stories: Adam Stoffel, Head of Operations

Founder stories: Marcos Ocasio, CTO

The foundation of modern software delivery process is Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and all its supporting procedures and systems. They transfer code from a developer's workspace to production. The emergence of the DevOps discipline, together with CI/CD systems and methods, has changed the engineering ecosystem. But with the gaining popularity of CI/CD, it has become an attractive attack surface for cyber-attacks. The number, frequency, and severity of events and attack vectors exploiting weaknesses in the CI/CD ecosystems are significantly increasing in the industry. Here are some of the more popular incidents:

Top 10 CI-CD Security Risks and How to Mitigate Them (Part 1)

Congratulations to Grominda Sdn. Bhd. for being selected to execute the Tech Immersion Programme 2022 sponsored by the Authority for Info-Communications Technology Industry (AITI) of Brunei Darussalam.  

Caravel Labs is proud to support Grominda in delivering training and coaching based on the same approach that is used in their academic internship program, Project Sunrise, and for onboarding its own consulting engineers. We are looking forward to being in Brunei during the week of January 30, 2023 thru February 3, 2023 to support this program.

Caravel Labs going to Brunei

Cuento largo corto para los lectores impacientes, las principales características de un backlog saludable son: limpio, estimado y priorizado. 

3 características de un backlog saludable

In a speech to the first cohort of Project Sunrise interns back in the summer of 2020, Yang Zheng, laid out his vision for the mid- to senior-level Consulting Engineer at Caravel Labs.

- A good software engineer is one who can design and implement the most elegant software solution that works as defined, in the most efficient manner.

- A good consultant on the other hand is one who is willing and able to embrace the customer’s entire environment – their needs, their wants, their desires, their real and perceived constraints, and reflect these in the definition of the solution.

- A good consulting engineer is one who is able to combine both of these.

Recruiting Top Consulting Engineers

By Subham Kundu and Marcos Ocasio

Open-source software (OSS) is very important to Caravel Labs. We rely on open-source software for many of the solutions supporting our internal operations but also integrate many community-developed open-source components in solutions we build for our consulting customers. Therefore, it makes sense for Caravel Labs to contribute back to the open-source software community. In this post we will cover our approach to contributing to open-source and introduce some of our latest open-source initiatives.

Open-source Software at Caravel Labs

Back in July we concluded our latest edition of Project Sunrise (read more about it here). The purpose of Project Sunrise is to identify not only the brightest among the community of budding software engineers, but also those who are most inspired to use their future profession for creating a more sustainable world. The next step is to give them a taste of what the satisfaction of applying their skills thoughtfully towards solving a meaningful problem. We do this in the hope that the entire community of software engineers, of which Caravel Labs is only a small part, benefits from engineers driven by intrinsic motivations rather than just the usual material incentives. We believe that through their experience in Project Sunrise they become part of the small but ever-growing pool of elite software engineers that are the pride of any software engineering organization in the world. 

Welcome Our Latest Team Members

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

Caravel Labs team members in the United States and Puerto Rico observe the Indigenous Peoples’ Day holiday on the second Monday of October. This holiday celebrates and honors the histories and cultures of the peoples who have lived in the Americas, since before the arrival of the first conquistadors, starting with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Since 2021, this holiday has also been recognized as a federal holiday by presidential proclamation.

Thoughts On Indigenous Peoples’ Day

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

The underrepresentation of women in both the creative and executive jobs in the tech industry is a handicap greater than what meets the eye. Like all kinds of underrepresentation, not only is it unfair to women who represent much closer to 50% of the human population, it denies the other tech community of the wisdom and perspective of close to half of humanity, thereby severely diminishing its impact and reducing its potential.

In Support of Girls Who Code

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

Less than 40% of software projects using modern software engineering practices meet their intended business goals, provide the expected value and satisfy the needs of their users. This is according to the latest report from Standish Group, which has been researching the success rates of software projects for over 25 years. That proportion used to be even less when waterfall approaches were dominant – just over 10% projects were successful back then, but thanks to the widespread adoption of iterative and incremental development (often termed as “Agile development”) and increasing emphasis on removal of developer toil using automation (often termed as “DevOps”), significant improvements have been made. However, a less than 50-50 chance of project success is outrageous, especially in an age where innovators and changemakers depend so heavily on software engineering to scale their impact towards a sustainable future for our planet.

It is therefore no surprise that the business of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service has become particularly critical to the success of software engineering efforts, and software product management has emerged as a key performance differentiator in the world of software development. When McKinsey published their report on the correlation between business agility and developer velocity in 2021, one of the core differentiators was an organization’s product management capabilities (the others being tools, culture and talent management). Incidentally, a conspicuous absence in defiance of prevailing wisdom was the absence of “Agile team practices”.

Demystifying Product Management

Project SunriseBy Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

Earlier this month, Caravel Labs concluded the second edition of Project Sunrise - our internship program where engineering students expedite their transition from an academic setting to a professional one, by solving a specific, non-trivial, real world problem in the form of a stable, working software solution that they develop end to end, over a 7-week period.

Project Sunrise

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

This is a question that we often encounter in different situations in our consulting practice. Our answer that we would like to spend as little time meeting customers in-person, or meeting in general, is often met with surprise. In the consulting industry, where much value has been put traditionally in the ability to travel to attend large events, meet with powerful and influential stakeholders and demonstrate one’s credential as a “thought leader”, we can understand why our position would be considered unconventional. 

How much time do you need in-person with the customer?

This weekend, Caravel Lab’s Head of Operations, Adam Stoffel, attended the Pridefest celebration in Seattle, our company’s worldwide headquarters, and shared these thoughts:

Reflecting on Pride 2022

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

At Caravel Labs, we believe that all technology should contribute to an equitable, just and sustainable world, which is why our mission is to build responsible software for innovators everywhere. Our customers are in the business of solving some of the most intractable problems and so they require not just innovative software solutions, they need them to be efficacious in the shortest possible time, and they need these software solutions to evolve quickly as the problems they are in the business of solving keep changing. This is why we take our responsibility to equip our customers with a high-performing software delivery and operations capability, and not just to build and operate a piece of software (read about how seriously we take software delivery performance in our previous post titled DevOps: Truth and Dare).

Recruiting Top Developer Talent

By Marcos Ocasio, CTO & Head of Engineering at Caravel Labs

Today we talk to one of our Software Engineers, Meghna Bharadwaj about her experience joining and working at Caravel Labs. Meghna joined Caravel Labs in 2020 right after graduating college and since then has consistently delivered quality software for our customers. Our hope is to inspire more emerging Software Engineers to join our growing team.

Interview with Software Engineer Meghna Bharadwaj

By Adam Stoffel, Head of Operations at Caravel Labs

A growing number of states in the US are adopting legislation requiring employers to disclose compensation information earlier in the interview and hiring process. Washington state, home to Caravel Labs’ corporate headquarters, recently passed SB5761, which requires employers with 15 employees or more to disclose wage or salary ranges in job postings. Previously, companies were only required to disclose pay information after making a job offer. 

Pay Transparency: Coming to a Job Posting Near You

Caravel Labs 2022 Internship Program Virtual Info Session

Last week marked a special milestone for Caravel Labs. James Liao started his full-time role as the Head of Research. James is the last of the five founders of Caravel Labs to become a full-time employee of the company.

The Band is Back

Caravel Labs is excited to work with Elsewhere to build a software solution for tailor-made travel experiences. We just finished a week of human-centric Exploration of how we can link travelers directly with Local Experts. In the next few months, we will innovate and design how to empower Local Experts in designing trips unique to every Traveler's needs.

Elsewhere Better Vision of Travel as Positive Force for Social Impact

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

We know what high-performing software delivery and operations looks like, but do we dare to confront the simple truth about it?

DevOps: Truth and Dare

By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs

As we learned in the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yesterday, the window for making change towards a sustainable future is closing faster than anticipated, and our failure to act adequately will imperil the very existence of our progeny if not ourselves. That is bad news.

The Time To Scale Your Impact Is Now

Caravel Labs’ approach to software consulting is very different from much of the industry. A critical component of our approach is a lean Engineering organization, composed of many small and self-organizing teams of engineers. We believe that if we place the focus on our customers’ desired business outcomes and high quality, rather than lists of features and accounting of hours of labor, we don’t need a dedicated business analyst or project manager to translate requirements for our engineers.

The Role of the Engineering Team Lead

According to McKinsey & Company’s 2018 article, 80% of companies have attempted digital transformation, but a whopping 70% of such efforts have failed. These failures almost invariably manifest themselves as missed schedules, missed budgets, and missed outcomes, and so it is only fair that both purveyors and providers focus heavily on estimation. An organization's collective ability to estimate whether they can meet the target around a desired business outcome by a certain time using the resources and people that they have at their disposal, determines whether they will meet or miss their commitment of digital transformation.

The Problem with Software Estimation Today

Innovation is fraught with risk, by its very nature, and therefore has few supporters, until an innovative idea is well-proven. Simultaneously, innovators, like the rest of us humans, are prone to ownership bias, which results in inflated confidence in their own ideas, putting their reputations and their budgets at risk. Working with innovators among startup founders, social entrepreneurs and public and private sector organizations for years, we see this problem and we have specifically designed a service to meet this challenge in a compelling and efficient way.

Our Art of the Possible Service

By Adam Stoffel, Head of Operations at Caravel Labs

The use of Design Thinking and rigorous development practices is integral to all of the technology and software work that we do at Caravel Labs, including on our own internal employee-facing tools and processes.

How technology and design thinking empower our internal operations

An Information Technology Provider for Innovators, of Innovators, by Innovators

Introduction to Caravel Labs

Yang Zheng, Principal Consultant at Microsoft and Co-founder, VP and Head of Consulting, Caravel Labs, Inc., passed away unexpectedly on December 10, 2020 at his home in Sammamish, WA at the age of 40.

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