About BaseKit
BaseKit is a software development company founded in 2008. Most of our 30-strong staff base is located near Bristol with others from the rest of the UK and Europe. The BaseKit platform is a responsive ecommerce, bookings and website builder currently used by over 100 telco and web hosting providers worldwide - powering over 9 million micro businesses. Our vision is a world where anyone with a business idea can thrive naturally, freely and with effortless success – powered by fast, simple and reliable technology.
Our Culture
As a team, we strive to be collaborative, open to new ideas and supportive of each other. We believe that a good team means work is a place of learning and personal growth without being a chore.
We are committed to encouraging a diverse, equal and inclusive workplace, this commitment is driven from the senior management team and shared by all of us here at BaseKit. In 2022 one of our major business objectives is to gain B Corp certification. This certification means we adhere to high standards of social and environmental impact.
We want everyone to share our values of inclusiveness, openness and working great together. We also recognise that written company values mean nothing if they aren’t backed up by our day to day behaviour.
BaseKit provides many perks in and out of work to all staff. First and foremost we prize work life balance, and the wellbeing of our employees, above all else. Before the official government lockdown we recognised the potential danger our staff could be in by coming into the office each day and allowed all staff to work from home full-time. During lockdown we ensured all staff had the equipment they needed at home and allowed staff to significantly adjust working hours to deal with the new found issues we all experienced during the pandemic. In addition we also offer perks such as private health care, yoga and company days out to name just some of them. We’ve worked hard to build a great development team here at BaseKit and we do everything possible to ensure the team is friendly and has a great bond.
Whilst we do still have an office in central Bristol, that staff are welcome to use if they choose, we are a remote first company and this role can be fully remote within a 2 hour timezone difference of the UK. Our core hours are 10:00-16:00 GMT Monday to Thursday and 10:00-12:00 GMT on Friday, with many staff taking the opportunity to work half a day on Friday.
Our Development Team
We recognise the importance of our developers, and ensure we provide them with the right tools to do their job. Our team use a mixture of MacBook Pros and high-end Linux laptops. We supply these and any other necessary equipment for our colleagues to work comfortably, be it remote or in the office.
The development community is important to us too, in pre-Covid19 days we used to host meetups in our office and we encourage the team to contribute to open source projects.
We really love it when we can see the GitHub profile of people applying for roles in our team. If you have a public GitHub profile, we’d be ecstatic if you sent it over. Don’t worry, we’ve got lots of unfinished side projects and test code on our profiles, we don’t expect to see a profile full of perfect code.
We understand the need to keep your skills up to date and the natural curiosity of software developers. In the spirit of this we have a 90/10 policy designed to give you some space to build something interesting, try a new technology or just fix a bug that’s been annoying you.
Technical Knowledge/Skills
As an experienced Web Application Developer you will be used to writing high quality software primarily using PHP. Having great software engineering skills and problem solving abilities are more important to us than knowing specific frameworks or libraries.
You'll be used to professional software engineering concepts such as DRY, SOLID, OOP, code composition and design patterns. We prefer composition over inheritance and use dependency injection a lot. Whilst we do maintain an amount of legacy code, we are continually moving forward and refactoring, so any new code is always using the latest PHP language features.
Testing is very important to us and day to day we will always complement our code with unit tests where appropriate, we ensure all business logic is tested but aren’t bothered about things like achieving 100% code coverage. We use Puppeteer to functionally test our product, we also have some legacy tests using Behat and Selenium. These tests form part of our continuous integration platform and automatically test our code deployments as part of our continuous deployment process.
Our development process and stack relies heavily on continuous integration so it would be advantageous for you to have worked in a team using CI. Familiarity with build/DevOps tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, webpack and Node would be a bonus.We use Docker in development and production. Our development environment is built on the same Docker images we deploy to our live environments. Our local development environments are provisioned automatically. As part of our continuous deployment process you’ll be using our slack bot to push your changes to our live environments.