What I Do

Operation mindset

  • First thing in the morning, check the daily error digest. See if anything needs addressing.
  • Throughout the day, keeping an eye on alerts slack channel.
    • Caught SQL injection attempt on May by doing this.

Unblocker

  • Always willing to help. People within the team ask for my help or my opinion just about everything.
  • Pair programming. Unblock people by being a rubber duck.
  • Talk to other squads on behalf of my squad on blocking issues. Even better I gradually introduce my squad to other squads so they can unblock themselves in the future.
  • Recoqnised by other squads as someone to go to to help them unblock their blockers.

Leadership

  • Provide leadership and initiatives in helping the team, for example:
    • Initiate design meetings for issues that need

Analysis / Architecture

  • Identified the root cause of our app slow performance, which was caused by 1 bad server out of 4. Recommended the removal of the server from the pool. Being data driven: measured the baseline performance prior the removal. Measure performance after the removal, to ensure no performance degradation.
  • Involved in key projects spikes, architecture design and analysis (SwG and Corp Subs).

Relational

Within the squad

  • Build and maintain relationship capital with everyone in the squad.
  • Being the glue - I make an effort to regularly talk to everyone in the team (the devs at least), I know most of them in a personal level as I take an interest in people and their lives.

Cross squads

  • Purposely build relationships with people from other squads: devops, productivity, metroweb, AFR, analytics, mobile apps. Almost in every team, I know the lead engineers that I can talk to unblock our team. On the flip side, other teams often go to me when they have subscription related questions, of which I was always been willing to help.

Third parties

Confidence in liaising with third parties and representing the organisation in a professional manner, for example: Streem incident in 2018. Working at finding the root issue, while at the same updating the relevant parties with the progress including Streem technical people, Bernie (?) the head of syndication, Dom and the rest.

Philosophies

  • Complexity is the enemy of software engineering. Keep it simple.
  • Kaizen, seek continual improvement regardless how small.
  • Software engineering is about people.
  • Software engineering is always about trade off.