Welcome to the Volocopter Dev Blog

We at Volocopter strive to bring urban air mobility to life. And of course offering a modern transport solution is impossible without the digital infrastructure to match. Thats where we from Volocopter's Digital Department come into play. Our goal is to realize VoloIQ, the digital backbone of our endeavor. Along the way we will learn many things, and we don't want to keep these learnings to ourselves. So here we are! Hello world!

What can you expect from this blog?

Honestly, we don't know yet what we will encounter on the way - and that's ok! We are venturing to realize a platform that will have to satisfy very strict requirements in order to ensure safe travels for our customers.

But we plan to share insights in our tech stack, best practices we apply or discover, architecture decisions and lessons learned when things didn't work out as expected.

TL;DR:

Memes

^[1]

We are nerds, and memes are an integral part of our culture. Thus, we plan to not take ourselves too serious. The articles should be as fun to read, as worth  knowing.

Sharing

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The history of Software is a history of sharing. From Open Source software to Articles like this. We want to give back some of our knowledge gained, and software written.

Ice Cream

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That is - for us, not you! That's right, our Head of Software promised us Ice Cream if we write articles! Who are we to decline such a beautiful offer?

Am I the right audience?

This blog is mostly oriented toward people working in and with software development. It will introduce us to quickly understand if it would be exciting for you to work here. To share the lessons we have learned in our software development environment. To show off all the latest and most remarkable technologies we use.

We will also publish our API Gateway soon, and we will share articles that will help you understand how to implement our endpoints technically.

It can get quite technical, so if r/programminghumor on reddit is over your head, probably this blog will be too.

Topics we will talk about

We plan to write about a broad field, that can roughly be clustered into the following parts:

Our Software Vision

This will include articles about the way we work, tools we use to steer our ecosystem like the technology radar, our usage of backstage.io and ADRs, or how we set up our product teams.

We and our users

From implementing a compelling design library to the value of a/b testing and research, we are going to share how to ensure we create an excellent experience for the users in a product that will be used worldwide.

Writing Software

In that area, we will tackle everything from designing our software architecture over implementing an SDLC to testing that whatever we build actually works. We will also share tutorials, best practices, and solutions to concrete problems.

Software in Production

Here are topics that care about running our software - from getting the product there via CI/CD pipelines, verifying the NFRs, working with the Cloud Adoption Framework, exposing data via API Gateways, or canary releasing. This is where we run it.

Data and us

Data is at the core of what we do. We will share different architectures that we implement in our product teams and the road towards our version of a data mesh soon. One that is harmonising how we use data in our enterprise IT products and the software we build in-house.