ChatGPT & AI: We’re incorporating AI into engageSPARK.

Tech Team

The mission of engageSPARK is to help organizations interact with anyone, anywhere. We from the Tech Team are building and running the platform that makes this possible.

A few facts about us:

  • We are multiculinary: Whether you like brewing German beer, barbecuing Hungarian sausage, preparing Indian Dhosa, frying Philippine sisig or cooking Polish Borscht, you’ll find someone to enjoy it with. Isn’t that a good thing? Different, interesting food all over!
  • We are a remote team. Some of us are in Cebu City, Philippines—where it all started—others are in India, Spain or somewhere in Asia. We travel often. In Joel Gascoigne’s classification, we’re a 3 on a way to a 4.
  • Programming languages we’re betting on: Golang, JavaScript, Python
  • Pictures? Did you say pictures?
  • We are looking for you!

What else should you know? Maybe the most important question is:

How do we improve?

And it is a good question. It’s a value of ours after all. And it’s the ability to improve that ultimately makes us an effective team. Some thoughts:

  • Everyone can improve it. This is not (just) the CTO’s job. Something regularly ruins your day? You better start a change.
  • Document and automate. We document our processes and support them with automation. That means for example we decide to remind ourselves to take carer of old issues. And we make our chatbot remind us, every day.
  • Let’s try. It’s an attitude. Maybe something is not broken, but maybe it can be better? Let’s try. Do we know if removing the Daily Standup will work? Maybe not. Let’s try.
  • Everything changes. All those processes and tools—up for change.

How do we work?

  • We are a remote team. We’re putting that first, because it changes how we collaborate. And because it’s not easy to pull off, and it’s never “done”. That’s why we dedicated a page of its own to how we work remotely.
  • We use GitHub to organize ourselves. (This mostly still up to date blog post talks about details.) GitHub also stores our code, we create pull requests there and do code reviews.
  • Jenkins checks our pull requests by running tests and static code analyzers and deploys into production.
  • Our QA is there to help the engineers. Not to do their job. Engineers solve problems in adequate quality.
  • We want to move fast. Perfect is the enemy of the good and good enough. Quality needs to be adequate, but it must be adequate.

 

Tech cloud

Ansible, AWS, Django, Docker, errbot, Git, GitHub, Go, Java, JavaScript, Jenkins, k8s, Linux/Ubuntu, NGINX, Postgres, Python, React, SNS/SQS (AWS), Thrift

If you want to know more, read our blog. Here are some excerpts:

Athena Is Revolutionizing Executive Assistant Recruitment in the Philippines with engageSPARK’s Bulk SMS Blasts

In the fast-paced world of executive recruitment, staying connected with potential candidates is crucial. Athena, a leading delegation technology company, is making strides in this area by using engageSPARK's bulk SMS blast platform to streamline its recruitment...

AI x ICT: ChatGPT and the Meaning of Surveys

Everyone and their dog is talking about ChatGPT. How it can take the bar exam. How it's a great personal assistant. How it writes you social media posts in a heartbeat. Of course… it can get you into hot water just as quickly. And it might just invent half the things...

AI x ICT: Chat Bots with Eyes

Think about the way Facebook recognizes your friends' faces when you upload a photo. To do it, computers had to learn to see like us, to understand and interpret what's going on in a picture or video. This is called computer vision—a part of the larger fields of...

Voicemail Detection

  The Voicemail problem Voicemails or answering machines started in the 70s and a lot of people still use them these days.  Its purpose remained the same – it is to let a machine answer incoming calls when the recipient cannot answer it or in some cases, does not...

Research on Humanitarian WhatsApp Surveys: An Overview of Papers and Reports

We all know WhatsApp as an easy-to-use chat app. But did you know that WhatsApp also plays an increasing role in research and humanitarian projects? For a couple of years now, universities and humanitarian organizations have explored WhatsApp as another option in the...