How Enova International uses GitHub

Hero image for the story: Enova International

Company Overview

Industry: Financial services
Company Size: 500+
Location: Chicago, IL

A pioneer in financial technology, Enova International has more than 1,200 employees who have worked to provide the company's 4 million customers worldwide with access to more than $17 billion in loans and financing.

The Challenge

An innovator in its industry, Enova is one of the largest commercial users of Ruby on Rails in the U.S. With a growing codebase and a technical team of more than 200, the company needed tools that better supported collaboration and integration.

The company was using Perforce and finding it difficult to keep branches up to date. "We started thinking about moving to a tool that would work with us rather than against us," explained Griffin Caprio, Director of Engineering at Enova. "The idea to evaluate GitHub came up quite organically."

The Decision

One of Enova's core values is "Best Answer Wins," and the company regularly acts on ideas surfaced by employees at all levels. When it came to exploring GitHub Enterprise, the initiative was driven by some of its engineers. "We have several engineers who actively contribute to open source. They shared their positive experiences with GitHub and, coupled with the security that GitHub Enterprise delivers, our leadership team decided to move forward," Griffin said.

The Implementation

Griffin credits the Enova IT team and support from GitHub with a seamless transition from Perforce to GitHub Enterprise. "For the software engineers, it felt like it was just off one day and on the next," he explained.

Enova uses GitHub Enterprise alongside:

TravisCI for continuous integration
JIRA for issue tracking
HipChat for team communication

Open Source and Innovation

Enova uses GitHub Enterprise to host its proprietary code while also hosting and contributing to open source projects on GitHub.com. One project Enova recently open sourced gives technology leaders a starting place for creating structured advancement journeys (or career ladders) for their organization's engineers.

"When you open source a project it encourages conversations and idea sharing that will help let the daylight in and spur innovation," Griffin said.

Results

Since moving to GitHub Enterprise, Griffin says the benefits have been significant: "Our teams are now traveling lighter. We're not carrying around code that isn't useful, code reviews are better, and we generally work better together. We're also seeing more employees learn to use Git and GitHub because it helps them stay connected to what's going on. Pull requests make the world go 'round.'"