"Continuous Learning, Growth & Preparation for New Challenges is the Main Motivator"

Today’s interview is with Marek Tihkan, CTO at Dashbird talking all about Dev team leadership and management.

Hey Marek, so can you tell us how long you’ve been at Dashbird and where you were before?

M: I’ve been at Dashbird for two years now. I worked with Taavi (CEO) at Testlio previously, where I was the Lead Architect for the core team. I built and managed the infrastructure there, and also provided guidance for the shift to microservices.

Can you tell us a bit about your team at Dashbird?

M: Sure, I lead a team of 6 developers now. For now, we manage without any divisions or specific roles per project so it’s very much an ‘everyone mucks in’ approach, which works incredibly well. This will likely change as we grow and expand our product offerings though.

It’s been a conscious decision for me to give each individual a good level of autonomy when it comes to our work; this means that anyone can be a feature lead owing to their experience and ideas on its progression. When it comes to putting features through their paces, we work in two different ways: blackbox testing style (testing by a dev who’s not been involved, so they QA its journey from a completely unbiased state), and through manual and detailed testing. Only as a team can we decide if the new feature is ready to launch or not.

How do you keep your team motivated, particularly during these times?

M: For myself and my team, continuous learning, growth and preparation for new challenges is the main motivator. It’s an open forum for mistakes to be made and lessons to be learned!

Especially during the height of the Covid-19 crisis, it was important to keep the morale and motivation high with as much business as usual. The great thing about us developers is that we love a challenge and problem solving - this never changes - and at Dashbird, we have a huge amount of data to play with and utilize so the team is always able to attempt different technical solutions for many anticipated and already experienced scenarios and issues. We also work on plenty of Proof of Concepts (POCs), for example at the moment we are testing and exploring different ways to store data dependent on differing needs. This sees us trying different AWS services such as S3, Kinesis, and Neptune, so there’s plenty to keep us busy.

Working at Dashbird is a fast track into the serverless world because of the deep-dive environment we surround ourselves in. With the substantial experience gained here, you’re safe in the knowledge that you’ll be incredibly valuable to any other company you move on to.

#management #team-productivity #leadership #management-and-leadership #engineering-management #serverless #business #startup

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

"Continuous Learning, Growth & Preparation for New Challenges is the Main Motivator"

Today’s interview is with Marek Tihkan, CTO at Dashbird talking all about Dev team leadership and management.

Hey Marek, so can you tell us how long you’ve been at Dashbird and where you were before?

M: I’ve been at Dashbird for two years now. I worked with Taavi (CEO) at Testlio previously, where I was the Lead Architect for the core team. I built and managed the infrastructure there, and also provided guidance for the shift to microservices.

Can you tell us a bit about your team at Dashbird?

M: Sure, I lead a team of 6 developers now. For now, we manage without any divisions or specific roles per project so it’s very much an ‘everyone mucks in’ approach, which works incredibly well. This will likely change as we grow and expand our product offerings though.

It’s been a conscious decision for me to give each individual a good level of autonomy when it comes to our work; this means that anyone can be a feature lead owing to their experience and ideas on its progression. When it comes to putting features through their paces, we work in two different ways: blackbox testing style (testing by a dev who’s not been involved, so they QA its journey from a completely unbiased state), and through manual and detailed testing. Only as a team can we decide if the new feature is ready to launch or not.

How do you keep your team motivated, particularly during these times?

M: For myself and my team, continuous learning, growth and preparation for new challenges is the main motivator. It’s an open forum for mistakes to be made and lessons to be learned!

Especially during the height of the Covid-19 crisis, it was important to keep the morale and motivation high with as much business as usual. The great thing about us developers is that we love a challenge and problem solving - this never changes - and at Dashbird, we have a huge amount of data to play with and utilize so the team is always able to attempt different technical solutions for many anticipated and already experienced scenarios and issues. We also work on plenty of Proof of Concepts (POCs), for example at the moment we are testing and exploring different ways to store data dependent on differing needs. This sees us trying different AWS services such as S3, Kinesis, and Neptune, so there’s plenty to keep us busy.

Working at Dashbird is a fast track into the serverless world because of the deep-dive environment we surround ourselves in. With the substantial experience gained here, you’re safe in the knowledge that you’ll be incredibly valuable to any other company you move on to.

#management #team-productivity #leadership #management-and-leadership #engineering-management #serverless #business #startup