Greg Nokes is a Master Technical Architect at Salesforce. His focus for this interview is on two members from MX Technologies, a fintech startup that helps financial institutions: Garrett Thornburg, an engineering team lead, and Brett Allred, its CPO. A consequence of COVID has been an increase in unemployment. In response to this, the U.S. Government came out with a paycheck protection program, or PPP, to lend money to small businesses to pay their staff. The program turned out to be incredibly popular, as banks and credit unions were inundated with applications to apply for these PPP funds. Many of these loans were processed by hand, and banks turned to MX Technologies to help process these faster.
The technical challenges were daunting, and due to the urgency of the situation, the team at MX Technologies worked on a solution over three days to try and get an app out there. Choosing Heroku as a basis for the tech stack was not a difficult decision. They were able to code something up using Rails, and an automatically scalable Redis and database system. The only concern was that because they were working with financial data, they needed to ensure that whatever system they used met rigorous security guidelines. Naturally, Heroku did, and it even passed third-party penetration tests, instilling confidence in their use by the government.
The MX team decided to open source their app and the Terraform scripts used to generate it because they want to make sure everyone is able to benefit from this essential program. Through their efforts, they've been able to help distribute $5 billion dollars, helping to save thousands of jobs and businesses.
Links from this episode118. Why Writing Matters for Engineers
117. Open Source with Jim Jagielski
116. Success From Anywhere
115. Demystifying the User Experience with Performance Monitoring
114. Beyond Root Cause Analysis in Complex Systems
113. Principles of Pragmatic Engineering
112. Managing Public Key Infrastructure within an Enterprise
111. Gift Cards for Small Businesses
110. Scaling a Bernie Meme
109. Meditation for the Curious Skeptic
108. Building Community with the Wicked CoolKit
I Was There: Stories of Production Incidents II
107. How to Write Seriously Good Software
106. Growing a Self-Funded Company
105. Event Sourcing and CQRS
104. The Evolution of Service Meshes
103. Chaos Engineering
102. Whether or Not to Repeat Yourself: DRY, DAMP, or WET
101. Cloud Native Applications
100. Math for Programmers
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