Every quarter, the Engineering team at Dashlane spends a week working on engineering-driven topics. We call this the Tech Week.
The goal is to build small but impactful projects, with different goals:
- Improving our efficiency: tech stack, tooling, automation
- Improve our product: small product improvements, refactors
- Forecasting future technology landscape: building POCs, learning new technologies
The purpose of this week is to boost people’s motivation by having anyone proposing and choosing what they will work on. We give a lot of freedom in the choice of projects, but don’t let it be completely off the beaten track: we make sure everything is a good use of our time by reviewing the projects to make sure they are aligned with our overall strategy and provide business value.
We also organize Hackathons once a year, but the intent is different: Hackathons are a moment of collaboration across the company, where engineers pair with design, product and marketing to imagine the future of the product.
Tech Weeks are really more about unlocking opportunities from within the engineering department itself.
We have been running Tech Weeks for a couple of years, and we have seen great projects taking off the ground thanks to it. Here are a few examples:
Public API & Dashlane Command Line Interface (CLI)
It started as a tech week project until it became an official part of our product that many of our customers love.
Dashlane CLI allows our users to interact with their Dashlane account, and to manage passwords, secure notes, secrets and personal data programmatically.
It also allows teams to access team admin related features such as accessing team's member list, activity logs and Dark Web Insights reports.
Passkeys
We did the first proof of concept of supporting passkeys in Dashlane in the browser during a tech week.
We quickly followed-up after that to make it a reality, and Dashlane was the first password manager to offer an in-browser passkey solution that allows users to automatically log in across websites without a password.
Dashlane was also the first password manager to demonstrate passkey support on Android and iOS.
Post-Quantum Cryptography
https://www.dashlane.com/blog/update-post-quantum-work
It is vital for Dashlane to prepare for the advent of post-quantum cryptography, as we know that some algorithms considered secure today could one day be broken by a quantum computer.
Our team has conducted explorations and prototyping over several tech weeks to prepare for implementation in the near future.
We released our exploration project on GitHub that provides JS bindings and a playground of a post-quantum asymmetric cipher compiled in WebAssembly.
We also developed successful prototypes for quantum-resistant sharing in our Android app and web extension.
Audit logs SIEM Integration
https://github.com/Dashlane/dashlane-audit-logs
This project allows our users to retrieve Dashlane's audit logs and send them in the SIEM or storage solution of their choice using Fluentbit. Our current solution provides out of the box configurations for the following solutions:
- Azure log analytics workspace
- Azure blob storage
- Splunk
- Elasticsearch
Back office improvements
Some engineers take this time to tackle a list of improvements to our Back office tool requested by our internal users, like our Customer Support team. We keep a list of requests and feedback they give us on a regular basis, and dedicate time during Tech weeks to add capabilities that could not be done as part of the "traditional" delivery cycle.
Code & release process improvements, addressing tech debt
Lots of other work happens in the background and is purely engineering focused.
For example, our engineers have taken the time to implement components of the extension using our new design system, addressing tech debt, adding more capabilities in our release process and our internal testing tools…
It does not replace the foundational work done by our platform teams, but it helps fill some of the gaps on projects that could not be prioritized yet, and that our engineers really want to see come to life.
Our engineers love having this type of very direct ownership, and it has created great results so far!
Check out our careers page if you would like to contribute to the future of our product, and discover what Engineering looks like at Dashlane
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