OmbuLabs Blog

As an agency, our business model revolves around time. Our client activities rely on a dedicated number of hours per week worked on a project, and our internal activities follow the same pattern. As such, time tracking is a vital part of our work. Ensuring time is tracked correctly, and time entries meet a minimum quality standard, allows us to be more data-driven in our decisions, provide detailed invoices to our clients and better manage our own projects and initiatives.

Despite being a core activity, we had been having several issues with it not being completed or not being completed properly. A report we ran at the end of 2022 showed our time tracking issues were actually quite severe. We lost approximately one million dollars in 2022 due to time tracking issues that led to decisions made on poor data. It was imperative that we solved the problem.

To help with this issue, we created an evolution of our Pecas project. We turned Pecas into a machine learning powered application capable of alerting users of issues in their time entries. In this article, we’ll talk though the business case behind it and expected benefits to our company.

At OmbuLabs, we love remote work. While other companies are asking employees to come back into the office, we are continuing to lean into the remote-first work culture that we had even before the pandemic. In this article, I will discuss the reasons why remote work is essential to the culture of our company. I will then outline how we create a culture that is both remote-friendly and productive.

Just before the world shut down in 2020, the team at OmbuLabs participated in an in-person retreat in Punta Cana. It was a wonderful experience, and the team was eager to have another retreat in 2021. We even began planning one, but with the safety of team members at risk because of the pandemic and the difficulty of traveling it soon became obvious that an in-person retreat would not be possible. Therefore we turned our attention to having the retreat virtually.

This ended up being a very successful event, and we wanted to share the experience and strategies that we used to plan and execute this retreat which took place virtually over four days towards the end of 2021.

I joined OmbuLabs as a Senior Software Engineer on February 11, which was a Friday-more on this later! Tomorrow I will have completed 2 weeks here. So if you want to find out about the onboarding process at OmbuLabs, read on.

At OmbuLabs the first step in the interview process for any of our open positions is the cultural fit interview. This interview will tell us a few things about the candidates. It should let us know if they have the kind of experience that would match well with the open job, it also shows us if the candidate would settle in well with the values of the team, and it tells us if we think we should offer a second interview.

OmbuLabs is a fully remote company based out of Philadelphia with team members in many countries. Currently we are growing pretty steadily, and we thought it would be a good idea to let prospective employees know what it would be like to work at OmbuLabs.

This article is based on questions we often get during interviews, so we hope it helps if you are thinking about applying to OmbuLabs. You can learn more about the recruitment process here.

One of the main goals we set for 2021 is to become more efficient as an agile team. And one of the challenges we addressed was how to minimize the decision-making bottleneck. To confront that we decided to take some actions that I’m listing below.

The discussion around the use of problematic words / terms in technology isn’t a new one. This issue can be traced back to, at least, 2003 when a Los Angeles county worker filed a complaint with the city’s Office of Affirmative Action Compliance after seeing “master” and “slave” in computer equipment labels.

This issue has resurfaced with recent events and, at OmbuLabs, we believe it is important to take it seriously. It is past time to remove this metaphor from our codebase and review some of the terminology we use. We have started taking the necessary steps to rename “master” branches to “main”, as well as (and perhaps more importantly) remove any reference to the term “slave” and replace “whitelist / blacklist” with “allowlist / blocklist”. Our team is actively working on that.

But we understand that is not enough. This is not an action that will solve racism by itself. It’s part of a larger commitment. In this article, I’ll explain the context and motivation for this change and how it fits with our core values and long term vision as a company.