Life at GO

  Every software developer, at some point or another, questioned the relevance of Unit Testing and googled "Why should I write unit tests for my application?", "What should my unit tests cover in terms of features?", or "How can I write proper unit tests?". Here at GO, we had the same questions when we wanted to take unit testing to a higher level and I will be taking you through our journey and how we answered these questions. Sit comfortably, take a cup of coffee or tea and let's go! Introduction The term "Unit Testing" is far from being a new terminology in the development industry. Records dating back to the 1950s show that the concepts behind unit testing were already being used, which is quite astounding. Whilst I would be very excited to start this discussion from the first concepts, I want to avoid boring you with too much detail of fundamental theories and proceed directly into answering some common questions. Even if you don't h...

2020 was the year that everything shifted – it significantly changed the way people worked and also the way they learnt and developed. Nowadays, learning experiences can take place anywhere, half a day seminars have been replaced with bite sized content that one can access online. Company training functions need to constantly adapt their strategies to be a key enabler of this digital transformation.  GO’s purpose is to drive a digital Malta where no one is left behind. This means that the people development function will need to play a pivotal role in continuously building leading edge digital skills in order to enable a purpose and values led culture, attract and retain top talent and ultimately achieve organisational growth. This is when the idea of the GO Academy came to life and when the inspiring journey began. Our vision for the GO Academy was to act as a key driver of change, in particular embedding the required skills, mind-set and behaviours to continue to build strategic ...

  Today is World Autism Awareness Day and it’s a day close to our hearts since our extended One GO Team includes individuals who are on the autism spectrum. We would like to take a moment to celebrate these people and those who love and support them, some of whom are our colleagues. We decided to interview a few working parents who are doing a pretty damn good job in succeeding both in work and in life, growing in their career, remaining supportive to the needs of their department and colleagues and always attentive to the needs of their families. They are an inspiration to us and therefore we wanted to take the occasion to raise awareness, increase understanding and acceptance, foster support and inspire a kinder, more inclusive world, through their experiences.   Two of our colleagues are sharing their experiences being parents of children with autism and shine a light on their journey to parenthood, GO’s family friendly measures, work-life balance and the ways they an...

  We dedicated a lot of our efforts last year on enhancing our online customer journey, aiming to align with the pandemic needs, provide more value, control and visibility to our customers and a better overall interaction with our website and mobile app.  Earlier this year we started sharing with you all the exciting projects our team worked on during 2020 and we now welcome you to the last part of this series of our Customer Online Experience blog.  Sit back, relax and enjoy this article!  Push Notifications  Let’s start with the Push Notifications of our GO app. Back in the summer we felt the need of identifying a new channel to deliver messages to our customers, and the Push Notifications on the mobile app was the solution.   Our customers receive notifications on their mobile and by clicking on them, they can immediately see what activity they need to do from the app.   A project like this brings together a number of teams, such as the Pr...

To begin with, let’s explain what telecoms is all about. The word telecommunications literally means "the sharing of information over a distance’’. Today telecommunications is a way of life, influencing the way we live, work, socialise, learn and rest. Telecommunications affects the how, where, when and the who of everyday living. It is pretty much an unavoidable part of our life, unless one lives in a cave and still wears dresses of skin or fur from an animal one hunted.  Telecoms plays a critical role in the shaping of society, culture, as well as business and economics. All of us working in the industry, in whatever capacity, are part of this revolution. While traditional telecommunications networks allowed us to cross time and distance barriers and shaped consumer demands, today, the tables have somewhat turned. It is customer behavior that is driving innovation and evolving trends. We live and breathe innovation and our goal is to connect our customers to what matters mos...

Just recently our GO Dev team embarked on a project to integrate Monday.com cloud service to one of our internal components. Their API was GraphQL and that's why we came to work with this technology. GraphQL is an API standard that provides a more efficient, powerful and flexible alternative to REST. It was developed and open-sourced by Facebook. At its core, GraphQL enables declarative data fetching where a client can specify exactly what data he needs from an API. Instead of multiple endpoints that return fixed data structures, a GraphQL server exposes only a single endpoint and responds precisely with the data the client asked for. In this technical article we will explain the what, why, and how you can use GraphQL based on our recent experience.  GraphQL vs REST GraphQL was developed to cope with the need of more flexibility and efficiency. It solves many of the shortcomings and inefficiencies that developers experience when interacting with REST APIs. Data Fetching Let us...