Information from ottonova's engineering teamhttps://ottonova.tech/https://ottonova.tech/from-wordpress-to-astro-moving-our-tech-blog-to-a-static-site/https://ottonova.tech/from-wordpress-to-astro-moving-our-tech-blog-to-a-static-site/This blog used to run on WordPress on a hand-built EC2 instance and an outdated MySQL database. It is now a static site built with Astro. Here is why we moved, what we found in the old blog, and how we made sure no content got lost.Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/evolving-our-tech-landscape-ottonova-tech-radar-q3-2025-update/https://ottonova.tech/evolving-our-tech-landscape-ottonova-tech-radar-q3-2025-update/At ottonova, we continuously evaluate our technology stack to ensure we’re using the best tools to deliver exceptional digital health experiences. Our quarterly Tech Radar update reflects our commitment to technological excellence and innovation. Here’s a summary of the key changes coming via our Q3 2025 Tech Radar update. Infrastructure Evolution Backstage has gained prominence…Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:09:48 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/how-we-transformed-our-daily-meetings-for-the-better/https://ottonova.tech/how-we-transformed-our-daily-meetings-for-the-better/Transform your meetings with ‘Walking the Board’ inspired by ‘Development That Pays.’ Discover how we made stand-ups more collaborative, efficient and focused on team success. Explore actionable insights to revitalize your daily meetings and enhance teamwork.Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:07:31 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/migrating-from-self-managed-rabbitmq-to-cloud-native-aws-amazon-mq-a-technical-odyssey/https://ottonova.tech/migrating-from-self-managed-rabbitmq-to-cloud-native-aws-amazon-mq-a-technical-odyssey/In the ever-evolving world of cloud-native solutions, it can be a daunting task to maintain message brokers. For a while, our team was responsible for a self-managed RabbitMQ instance. While this worked well initially, we encountered challenges in terms of maintenance, version updates, and data recovery. This led us to explore Amazon MQ, a fully…Thu, 12 Oct 2023 22:11:10 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/introducing-the-ottonova-tech-radar/https://ottonova.tech/introducing-the-ottonova-tech-radar/We always promoted openness when it came to our tech stack. The ottonova Tech Radar is the next step in that direction. What is the Tech Radar? The ottonova Tech Radar is a list of technologies. It’s defined by an assessment outcome, called ring assignment and has four rings with the following definitions: ADOPT – Technologies we…Thu, 30 Jun 2022 12:53:39 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/4-rules-for-building-successful-cross-functional-teams/https://ottonova.tech/4-rules-for-building-successful-cross-functional-teams/ottonova has a long history of using cross-functional teams for Software Engineering. Very early on we tried to establish them to become more productive and product centred. It took us a few tries to get it right and oh boy, did we make a lot of mistakes along the way. I would like to share…Wed, 04 May 2022 13:02:15 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/recruiting-backend-engineers-at-ottonova/https://ottonova.tech/recruiting-backend-engineers-at-ottonova/Here are some words about how the Backend Team goes about finding new team members. We want to do our part and share with the Community, as well as provide a bit more transparency into ottonova and how we are building state-of-the-art software that powers Germany’s first digital health insurance.  This article covers what we…Tue, 03 May 2022 13:12:00 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/ctf-writeup-capture-the-ti-erx/https://ottonova.tech/ctf-writeup-capture-the-ti-erx/A few days back, the gematik – the organisation responsible for the secure network infrastructure (called telematic infrastructure or TI) of health actors – held their first CTF. The background of the CTF was the e-prescription which publicly insured people in Germany may now use to get their medicine without the need for a prescription…Mon, 20 Dec 2021 10:07:36 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/how-and-why-we-updated-rabbitmq-queues-on-production/https://ottonova.tech/how-and-why-we-updated-rabbitmq-queues-on-production/In this article, I would like to share with you and the whole internet our experience of dealing with RabbitMQ Live updates. You will learn some details about our architecture and use cases. Let’s start from the simplest… Why do we need RabbitMQ in our business? Our Architecture As a health insurance company, our business…Sat, 05 Dec 2020 13:33:01 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/continuing-the-hackathon-tradition/https://ottonova.tech/continuing-the-hackathon-tradition/At ottonova, we have taken the challenge of bringing a slowly moving and mostly antiquated business, the one of health insurance in Germany, into the 21st century. For over three years already we’ve been offering our customers not only competitive insurance tariffs, but also the digital products that go along with them. All this to…Mon, 21 Sep 2020 13:46:23 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/attending-gophercon-online/https://ottonova.tech/attending-gophercon-online/2020 will be remembered for a very long time by the quarantine and the accompanying restrictions. All events where there is a crowd of people have been cancelled and we are trying to adhere to all recommendations. It would seem that this year’s conference would be impossible. But tough times await new solutions, and now…Mon, 10 Aug 2020 13:23:58 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/bulgaria-php-conference-2019/https://ottonova.tech/bulgaria-php-conference-2019/Let’s talk about organization, preparation and venue first. From my point of view, the organizers did a lot to make this conference great, at least they tried to do their best. The conference, same as the workshop took place in the very center of the city, in the biggest public hall. It was quite easy…Mon, 16 Dec 2019 11:36:08 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/php-barcelona/https://ottonova.tech/php-barcelona/I and the rest of the PHP engineers at ottonova, had the pleasure of attending the PHP.Barcelona Conference in November this year. It was a great experience, spanning over two full days. I’ve put together some quick and biased notes about the presentations. Here it goes… Day 1 Opening Keynote – Rasmus Lerdorf Really uplifting…Fri, 13 Dec 2019 16:09:43 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/our-android-apps-permissions-explained/https://ottonova.tech/our-android-apps-permissions-explained/Permissions Starting with Android 6 (Marshmallow), Android has been improving and shaping permissions, adding more control to users and a better overview of what apps do with those permissions. App permissions are going in a direction of more transparency and security. Still, it’s not always easy to understand why some permissions are needed some times.…Tue, 05 Nov 2019 16:59:05 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/why-we-switched-from-moment-js-to-day-js/https://ottonova.tech/why-we-switched-from-moment-js-to-day-js/Moment.js is an awesome library when it comes to performing complex date-time manipulations. It provides a rich and clean API that covers many use cases. That aside, Moment.js shouldn’t always be the go-to library when it comes to date-time problematics. Alternatives should be considered as well. What are the alternatives? Actually, there are plenty of alternatives…Wed, 12 Jun 2019 14:50:34 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/uber-unsere-ausgeschriebene-qa-stelle/https://ottonova.tech/uber-unsere-ausgeschriebene-qa-stelle/We would like to use this article to give some insights on the QA Engineer position here at ottonova and to answer This article gives some insights on the QA Engineer position here at ottonova. Since the position can be interpreted quite differently we want to answer some common questions. Here we go. 1. Is…Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:44:32 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/hosting-a-meetup-for-the-first-time-swift-lighting-talks-03-09-2018-at-ottonova-hq/https://ottonova.tech/hosting-a-meetup-for-the-first-time-swift-lighting-talks-03-09-2018-at-ottonova-hq/We at ottonova make private health insurance better, simpler and faster by being the first digital health insurance company in Germany. The main touchpoint with our customers are the mobile apps. They are raising the bar for the health insurance sector in Germany by introducing more digital convenience. We love to push the limits of…Mon, 27 Aug 2018 14:36:20 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/about-tech-stack-transparency/https://ottonova.tech/about-tech-stack-transparency/Hi everybody! At ottonova, we believe in being transparent about the technology stack we use. We see no reason to keep it a secret. Possible concerns we sometimes hear are about the following two domains: Our approach is to use mature technology stacks, follow best practices, and incorporate new technology components as needed. This approach…Sat, 25 Aug 2018 16:53:00 GMThttps://ottonova.tech/welcome-to-our-tech-blog/https://ottonova.tech/welcome-to-our-tech-blog/Hello everybody, with this post we want to kick off the ottonova.tech blog and also explain what it’s for. With this blog we sincerely want to give you insights on how we create the software and platform behind ottonova. The first newly founded private health insurance in a long time. We are assembling a strong…Sat, 25 Aug 2018 13:03:36 GMT