Gusto

From Interns to Engineers: Class of 2023's Transition to Full-Time Roles at Gusto

Welcome to our 2-part blog where we’re excited to share our reflections as former interns at Gusto. Read more to learn about their intern experiences, professional development, and what it means to build with Gusto.

Unraveling a Spaghetti Model

In many established Ruby on Rails applications, there are often a couple of classes that become entangled with the rest of the code base. These early models start small and simple, possibly present…

Why Logic Programming Is the Best Choice for Authorization

Despite great efforts, authorization has long been problematic to represent cleanly in code and/or data. Logic Programming takes a new approach to this problem in an effort to better structure and organize authorization policies.

The Weirdest Bug I’ve Seen Yet

In an investigation for an on call issue, we followed a series of incorrect hypotheses before ultimately discovering a surprise at the end of the debugging rainbow.

Growth platform series: Getting started with instrumentation and analytics

This is the first post in a series of articles that goes over what it takes to build a growth platform that can power a SaaS company.  We will start with Instrumentation and Analytics, the source of all user insights and the foundation of any growth platform.

Gusto Eng Spotlight Series: Jocelyn Lindenger

Today, we're spotlighting Jocelyn Lindenger, who has been with Gusto for 3.5 years as an Engineering People Empowerer for the Run Payroll Experience team.

Data Engineering on People Data

The application of analytics to people data empowers organizations to harness the full potential of their most important asset: their people.

Safely Removing Dead Columns

I started with an audit of the model. I skimmed through each method, trying to see where to start. After the read through, I then looked at the database columns. I noticed that some of these had not been written to in years. I chose to clean up our database table before taking anything else.

How We Made Payments Packaging 81 Times Faster

At the end of December 2022, we’d see our largest spike in payments volume ever thanks to a year of tremendous customer growth and various payroll schedules aligning to fall on the same date. We wouldn’t be able to make it.

Breaking Down the GraphQL Monolith and Automating Developer Workflows through Rails Generators

In this blog, we discuss scaling Gusto’s GraphQL schema using subgraphs, and the tooling to make that fast and easy for engineers.

Gusto Eng Spotlight Series: Ahsen Turksoy

5th post in the series! Today, we're spotlighting Ahsen Turksoy, who has been with Gusto for 9 months on the Benefits Automations team as part of Gusto Turkiye.

How We Made Gusto Page Loads 40% Faster

For businesses with 25 or more employees, pages load 1.4 times faster. After loading gusto.com for the first time, navigations in Gusto are 2 times faster. For smaller businesses, page loads are 1.2 times faster, and all navigations after the first are now 1.8 times faster.

The 80% abstraction

Why do large systems become monolithic, and what should we do about it? Let's explore how the 80/20 'Pareto Principle' applies to software development, and use the same method to refactor the monolith.

Singed, a Profiler Front-End for Ruby and Rails Applications

Singed was built to be a swiss-army-knife frontend to helping you to easily capture and view flamegraphs in Ruby.

Gusto Eng Spotlight Series: Shawn Stewart

Introducing Shawn Stewart, Head of Engineering for the Payroll Experiences group!

Our Ruby on Rails System Tests Got 4 Times Faster With One Setting

How to use the config.file_watcher setting to speed up your Ruby on Rails application's tests.

Testing in Android With Robolectric

When I first started working on Gusto’s Android app, I was surprised by the Android community’s consensus that testing is hard.

Creating inspired engineers — shorten the customer feedback loop

Strategies to excite and inspire product engineers by shortening the feedback loop between them and customers.

A How-to Guide to Ruby Packs, Gusto's Gem Ecosystem for Modularizing Ruby Applications

A How-to Guide to Ruby Packs, Gusto's Gem Ecosystem for Modularizing Ruby Applications

Gusto Eng Spotlight Series: Upeka Bee

Today, we're spotlighting Upeka Bee, who has been with Gusto for 5 and a half years. She is currently the Head of Engineering for the PIE group (People Information Ecosystem).

Collaborative peer reviews: how they work, and why they’re better

My team has found a way to make peer reviews more collaborative (and fun!). Through this new process, we also give and receive higher-quality feedback with a smaller time commitment.

Gusto Eng Spotlight Series: Joshua Adeyemi

2nd post in the series! Introducing Joshua Adeyemi, who has been with us for 3 years working on the Data Platform team.

The Beauty of Brownfield Development

This blogs talks about the advantages of brownfield vs. greenfield development and how the Gusto Embedded team was able to quickly build out their product by taking advantage of both.

Gusto Eng Spotlight Series: Sofia Carrillo

First post in the series! Introducing Sofia Carrillo, who has been with us for 3 years on the Accountants Engineering team.

A start-to-finish walkthrough on creating a Ruby gem with CI and CD

Creating an open source Ruby gem is easier than you might think! In this post, we will be walking through the process of creating and publishing a Ruby gem from start to finish.

Finding the Less-Risky Path Together: Security Partnership at Gusto

Prodsec teams have found a secret weapon: security partners that consult with engineering teams to find and reduce risk in new features. Learn more about how Gusto’s security partnerships teams work, how we promote secure development, and why you might consider a security partner role.

Payroll Industry Needs Efficient Integration with Government

Nearly three million U.S. employers, representing more than 48% of the private sector workforce, use a payroll service provider (PSP) to calculate, pay and file employment tax returns. The largest payroll companies in the US deposited over 45% of all IRS employment taxes collected in 2016

Scaling Sidekiq at Gusto

Over the past year at Gusto, we’ve drastically changed how we approach Sidekiq in our main Rails monolith. This post dives in.

Deciding on Your Very First Second Job, as a Software Engineer - Part 2

A year into my first job out of school, I found myself feeling content with my job but wanting more. As I embarked on finding and creating a path that would be more fulfilling for me, I found myself pretty confused on how to approach finding my second job.

Deciding on Your Very First Second Job, as a Software Engineer - Part 1

A year into my first job out of school, I found myself feeling content with my job but wanting more. As I embarked on finding and creating a path that would be more fulfilling for me, I found myself pretty confused on how to approach finding my second job.

Performance Engineering at Gusto

How a side project became a movement that created real cultural change

Laying the Cultural and Technical Foundation for Big Rails

This was Gusto's system graph. Each of the black rectangles you see here is a subsystem within Gusto's biggest Rails monolith, and the red arrows are where one subsystem talks to another. As our business grew, folks started having a hard time making large changes in our codebase. Initially, we

Why You Should Have a Dedicated Technical Group Within Your Org

A dedicated group can help your organization develop a deep sense of ownership of your products and processes and enable you to drive the technical strategy

How We Upgraded Rails Safely

Upgrading Rails can often be difficult and risky! I'll be walking through the process my team took to safely upgrade to Rails 7.0. While this is going to be relatively Rails and Ruby specific, I hope you can take away something for software you are upgrading.

A Developer's Second Brain on Plaintext

This post is about how I use a simple plaintext file to extend my brain and manage my working memory. This approach helps me deal with engineering related tasks.

Simple steps for a better technical interview

Technical interviewing can feel formidable. Make it easier by standardizing your interview process.

End to End Feature Development at Gusto

Many engineers, including myself, wonder what the end-to-end ownership of a feature looks like for a software company. I’ve had the opportunity to work on several projects with end-to-end ownership, and I wanted to share my journey at Gusto in building a feature to empower our product managers to

Refactoring, One (Smart) Step at a Time

Growth Engineering is all about growing the user base. Of course, to grow a user base, the product quality is important, but there should also be some effort (lots of effort, actually), to persuade the user to try using the product in the first place.

Security is Testing

Many security teams operate like QA teams of yore. Testing was mostly absorbed into standard engineering practice - security is next.

How to stop staring at Jira and get stuff done

At Gusto, teams have a lot of autonomy on how they work. Teams can define their own processes. Over the past year, my team has developed a somewhat unconventional method that has resulted in better productivity, outcomes, and team happiness.

Bust through analysis paralysis

How does a payroll engineering organization give the green light for a basal change to their tax system when the consequences reach many domains, features, and teams? With a decision matrix we were able to break down our options, clearly compare solutions, and find a path forward.

7 VSCode tips you don’t want to miss

Hello! My name is Jordan and I’m a software engineer on our Design Systems team at Gusto. Since joining Design Systems I’ve found it super helpful to use VSCode especially when working with React and Typescript. I scoured the internet for the best VSCode tips and tricks engineers

Guice Shop CTF - Kill Chatbot Challenge

IntroductionToday we will be looking at the Gusto Guice Shop CTF event. This event uses the OWASP Juice Shop vulnerable web application to learn how to identify and exploit common web application vulnerabilities. What is CTF?CTF (Capture The Flag) is a kind of information security competition that challenges contestants

The One Where an Engineer Dabbles in Design

My two months as a designer and takeaways from a cross-functional rotation - including why it might be right for you

The Accidental Tech Lead

What to do when you’re the most senior junior engineer

How to prevent non-atomic actions in Rails transactions

In this post, we'll look at what problems these non-atomic actions pose and walk through a few examples of how to fix them. We'll also cover isolator, a gem that helps us detect these non-atomic violations.

Cultivating Engineering Growth

As someone who was recently promoted to senior engineer, this journey is still fresh in my mind. Here are some ways that senior engineers have helped during my career path from junior to senior engineer.

Protecting sensitive data at Gusto with HAPII - Part 2

In part 1, we covered the goals and benefits of isolating the most sensitive customer data to a separate service, that we call HAPII - The Hardened PII store. Briefly, the isolation of the data, explicit retrieval API, and greater observability into how data is used have helped drive change

What is Growth Engineering?

The ultimate goal of a growth team is to enable, activate, and retain paying customers on the platform who like the functionality so much, they’re willing to refer others to it—which creates a flywheel of satisfied customers and boosts revenue along the way.

Build Confidence in your Feature with a Test Fest

The work is done, your team has spent the days, weeks, months, building a new feature and it is ready to deploy! But wait - will this new feature break everything? Build confidence in your new feature with a test fest.

Protecting sensitive data at Gusto with HAPII - Part 1

Gusto is a custodian of some of your most sensitive personal and financial information. We take this responsibility seriously, and are constantly reviewing our security posture and data handling practices for ways to improve well beyond the industry standard. Most software systems operate on the basis of perimeter security -

Running AutoPkg in Github Actions

We’ve been running AutoPkg on Github Actions since late 2019 and wanted to share how we set up our build pipeline.

Service Level Objectives for On-call Peace of Mind

Using Service Level Objectives (SLOs) can increase your ability to focus while providing better service and responses to your customers.

Day in the Life of a Gusto Engineer: New Grad Edition

It’s been two years since we gave the world a look at a “normal day” as a Gusto engineer. Since then the org has grown nearly three-fold and matured as an organization. So we decided to take another crack at it; this time, we’ve talked to engineers from

Build what matters

In this final part of the series, we will take a closer look at how to actually bring an experiment to life as a full-fledged feature.

Build What Matters

In this first post of this series, we’ll talk about how to find an outcome-based experiment and defined a realistic minimum lovable product (MLP).

From Legislation to Code: How Gusto helped customers maximize their PPP Loan Forgiveness

photo by https://www.pexels.com/@cqf-avocat-188397Over the past few months, multiple teams at Gusto have been rallying behind initiatives that help businesses navigate the uncertainties brought by the Coronavirus pandemic. Among these projects is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiveness report. Through working on this report, we’ve

Chipping Away at a Monolith

My team's journey toward unbundling our part of Gusto’s monolithic Ruby on Rails app.

Onboard New Engineers #withGusto

How to Onboard Your Own Engineering Teammates Hurray! That engineer that you interviewed a few weeks ago just signed and your manager asked you to help onboard them. You’re not the new hire’s manager, but you do know what it’s like to be an IC (individual contributor)

Hello, New York! Launching Gusto’s Newest Homebase

Exactly six months ago, in September 2019, Gusto became a three-homebase company by opening a New York office in Lower Manhattan.

Tips for Engineering a Company Rebrand

Rebranding your company can be fun, but people rarely talk about the engineering work needed to bring a new design to life. Here are a few lessons the engineering team learned during Gusto’s most recent rebrand.

Gusto & Xero: Building a Massive Integration Across Two Companies

Recently, Gusto became the preferred payroll provider of Xero in what was both companies’ largest software integrations to date.

Lessons I Learned From Renaming in Ruby

My first week on a team, I broke production. Advices for renaming in a dynamic language, where it is difficult to find the usages you are looking for.

Gusto Engineering's Diversity Update: It's Not Just About the Numbers

Semi-annual diversity update from Gusto's Engineering team

Giving High Leverage Code Reviews

Code reviews can be leveraged for so much more than finding bugs. In this post, learn how to approach a code review and give feedback to your team that ensures quality and growth.

How to Make Your Pull Requests Reviewer-friendly

Have you ever opened a pull request and been stuck on filling out the description? Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your code reviews? If so, the tips in this post are for you.

Does this code spark joy? Tidying up your code bit by bit.

Tidying is an easy way to tackle messy code. Here are some tips and tricks for tidying up your codebase!

What is Data Engineering?

Job titles with the word "data" in them are known to be an enigmatic black box. This post explains how the pieces of the data pipeline fit together.

Ruby Blocks Simplified

One of the most unique and often misunderstood features of Ruby is blocks. Blocks are Ruby’s version of closures and can be used to make code more reusable and less verbose. But keywords such as yield can be hard to grok at first and make this functionality a bit

7 Tips for Building a Startup Within a Startup

Introduction As the engineering lead on the Flexible Pay team, I often get asked by my colleagues, “What is it like to work in a startup within a startup?” First, some context: Two years ago, Gusto decided to build the Flexible Pay feature, offering employees the opportunity to access their

Debugging Memory Bloat

Or, that time a single column update crashed our app unsplash-logoFredy Jacob A while back, a single class of jobs took down all of our async processes due to Out Of Memory problems. I told you how we prevented the general problem of a single class of jobs halting all

A Practical Guide to Building Secure SSO

Understanding how to build Single Sign On (SSO) using the OAuth 2.0 framework with OpenID Connect may seem like a daunting task. This practical guide will show you how to build a secure SSO system.

Nonce-based Content Security Policy (CSP) in Rails

Content-Security-Policy (CSP) is an HTTP response header or a meta tag with a set of directives. The set of directives can be viewed as instructions for the browser on what type of content to trust and where and how such content can be sourced.