This page is maintained by the 🤖Engineering Team

Who we are?

We are a group of 25(and growing) Problem Solvers. We have gathered here at HelloBetter from different parts of the world to solve the biggest problems in mental health.

🧬 Our Engineering Culture

• We believe in rewarding collaboration ahead of egos
• Agility ahead of process
• Autonomy and Ownership ahead of micro-management
• And Patient first ahead of presumptions

🛠️ Methodologies & Principles

The teams have the autonomy to decide together the methodology that it’s best for them. We currently have squads running Scrum and others Kanban. We believe in collaborative decisions like this to build the best environment for everyone.

🤝 How do we work

At HelloBetter the Engineering and Product Team are working together in cross-functional teams.

Squads are formed to tackle product and engineering initiatives, which allows its members to focus on one objective at a time. They are largely self-managed and have ownership over their workflow and rituals (such as daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and product&tech refinements).

Our teams promote cross-collaboration between different roles to develop the best solutions to our business problems.

Each squad contains the following roles:

🧑🏽‍💼  1 Engineering Manager + 1 Product Manager 🌐  2 Frontend Engineers 📲  2 Mobile Engineers 👩🏽‍💻  2 Backend Engineers 👨🏿‍💻  1 QA Engineer

In addition, we have some people that are not part of a single squad but support multiple squads at once. For example, our PD (Product Designer), our Engineering Manager, and some chapter-leads attend multiple squad rituals.

Chapters at HelloBetter are made up of people working on the same platform (mobile, web, backend, QA). They align on engineering standards and address platform-specific issues.

⚙️ Architecture

Our architecture is designed for flexibility and growth, supporting a language-agnostic microservices approach with a focus on NodeJS. We create distinct platforms for patients and therapists, and a backoffice for platform management, ensuring a seamless experience for all users.

Tech-stack

• Programming Languages: NodeJS (major), TypeScript, and JavaScript
• Frameworks and Tools: React for web development, React Native for mobile apps, Fastify for backend services, and tools like webdriver.io, frisby.js, & Detox for testing.
• Databases and Cloud: PostgreSQL and MongoDB for our data storage needs, with AWS hosting our infrastructure.

Security

Security is at the heart of everything we do. We put a lot of effort into making sure our systems are designed with as much rigour as possible. Our systems are compliant with several different regulations like GDPR, MDD/MDR (Medical Device regulations) and we implement a company-wide quality management system according to ISO 13485 (QMS) and ISO 14971 (Risk) standards. In 2021, we further implemented ISO 27001 to comply with the Digital Care Act.

Apart from that, we are very active in growing a security mindset amongst engineers and all employees with our Legal Counsel helping us to balance compliance and agility.

CI/CD

• Full CI/CD via Jenkins, unstable/staging/production branching scheme
• All standardized & automated with 80%+ test coverage

Testing

Mostly full test coverage across projects. Developers are responsible for writing tests themselves. Integration tests are written and run continuously against testing and live environments. QA tests are written by the team continuously.

Development vs. maintenance

As we are building our new platform from scratch we will be 100% developing new features in the beginning. Then we 75/25, mostly development and some maintenance.

📈 Platform usage

We will architect the platform to be able to serve more than 1 Mio patients with thousands of simultaneous users (including video streaming).

Our current addressable market contains 14 Mio people in Germany. With the new regulation, we are able to address 70+ Mio people. We assume the prevalence of psychological disorders to be at 20% of the population.

❤️ Open-Source

We are community players and deeply believe in the power of open-source. You have our full support to open-source as much of our work as possible. Although, we know that lots of companies make promises about open-sourcing stuff. Reality tells a different story and we know sometimes it can be really challenging to achieve, especially during the early stage.