Skip to main content

Two Months

As a new technology executive, my biggest worry is whether I am focusing on the right issues. My prior roles primarily required technical work, but they mostly involved small problems and small teams. For my first executive position, I expected to focus on organizational issues more than technical ones. Two months in, I think my expectations and role reset strategy were about right.

Here are some of the challenges I've been working on so far:

  1. Hiring. I'm shifting the organization from being mostly outsourced offshore to a more even onshore/offshore model. Sourcing and assessing engineers for senior roles has been challenging. I'm committed to building a great team. This is my top priority, and so far we've filled two of the four most senior roles. Our offshore people are solid, and I'm really excited about the new people we're hiring.
  2. Process. We need a simple and unambiguous approach for software development. I've been pushing the team to use Jira and Confluence more consistently, but the biggest break is that my first senior-level hire is an experienced agile practitioner - we're working together to reshape development processes. Process improvement is going to be a long-term effort for the team.
  3. Technology Vision. My background in data engineering has mostly been in publishing. The approaches necessary for ad-tech are new to me. I'm reading up on Kafka, HBase, Cassandra, Hadoop, Spark and other data frameworks. I'm focused on how these concepts fit with our business strategy - and how to best evolve our current platform. With the right team, our data engineering efforts will accelerate. Maybe I'll even get to code a bit.
For now my focus is squarely on engineering management - hiring, process, technology vision. My team can code, but only I am positioned to translate our business context into the right overall approach. I have to focus on management.

There are times I doubt this approach, and I worry about my credibility as a software engineer. Is it possible to be a technical leader without coding? Last year my answer would have been an emphatic no. This year I'm making different choices for a new situation.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ReactJS, NPM and Maven

I'm just starting to get into working with ReactJS, Facebook's open source rendering framework. My project uses SpringBoot for annotation-driven dependency injection and MVC. I thought it would be great if I could use a bit of ReactJS to enhance the application. If you're looking for a basic conceptual intro, I recommend ReactJS for Stupid People and of course the official documentation  is quite good. In full disclosure, I still have no idea how to do "flux" yet. As an experienced Java backend developer, I'm pretty decent at hacking Maven builds - which is precisely what this blog post is going to be about. First, a word about how React likes to be built. Like many front-end tools, there is a toolkit for the node package manager (NPM). From the command prompt, one might run npm install -g react-tools  which installs the jsx command. The  jsx  command provides the ability to transform JSX syntax into ordinary JavaScript, which is precisely what I want...
21 comments
Read more

Cryptic Facebook Message

Facebook OAuth2 is a feature I frequently integrate, but sometimes its error messages can be downright opaque. In particular I keep on forgetting to associate my Facebook account on applications where Sandbox Mode is enabled. The error message in this case is the following: Sorry, this feature isn't available right now: An error occurred while processing this request. Please try again later. This message is super cryptic, since what I usually need to do is to register my account as a tester or admin on the Facebook application page. If you get this error message here are the steps to fix it: As an application administrator, go to the OAuth2 configuration page for the application in Facebook. Add the Facebook account as an admin or tester on the "edit roles" screen. This will send an application request to that account. As the added account, accept the application request to become an admin or tester. At this point the Facebook login should work for the accou...
1 comment
Read more

Generating a Self-Signed SSL Certificate

I recently switched some web services to use SSL, and I was surprised that I couldn't find a good non-interactive script to generate the files needed for Jetty and other Java containers. After working my way through writing the script, I have decided to share my approach. This script generates a SSL subdirectory of whatever folder it lives in, and to that directory it adds a password file, certificate and a Java-friendly PKCS12 version of the certificate. And then I have my Maven build process copy the generated files into the base of my classes directory. The embedded Jetty instance needed an input stream of the PKCS12 file and the contents of the password file to create a SSL connector. Reading from the classpath can be a bit tricky - I should post about that later. From past experience, I think Nginx also requires the certificate file when configuring SSL.
Post a Comment
Read more