My name is Ricardo and I recently joined a tech startup, Codacy. This is the story of my first 45 days there.
Past Experience
I’ll start with some discussion of my past experiences.
If I was to define myself I’d define myself as a very curious person, a jack of all trades and master of some.
Back in my youth, before I had any contact with computers, I was completely passionate about how electronics and devices worked, while most kids would be playing with toys I’d be tearing down televisions, VCR’s, Hi-Fi systems and pretty much everything I could get my hands on just to look into its interior and try understand what was happening under the hood. Truth be told that the only thing I got out of it was broken hardware and angry parents. (Sorry mom, I know you loved that Hi-Fi system..)
My First Computer
Then it all changed, I got my first computer, it was a spectrum zx and right away I got amazed as I now owned a system I could actually interact with in an active manner, right there in that moment I knew, I knew that my future would be somehow related to computers or similar systems.
As a professional I’ve passed through very different companies and industries. I’ve worked from logistic companies, to finance and insurance, consulting, and even gaming. Some were tech startups some were more advanced. At each one of them I got the opportunity to grow as a person and professional, to work and meet great people and being lucky enough to have great mentorship and opportunities to work in many different things, from tool development, bare metal datacenter to full cloud infrastructures deployment and administration, systems architecture, devops and team leading .
When João and I first spoke he was looking for a devops person that could help Codacy implementing overall best practices, that could also do infrastructure administration and management, and also someone that could help him leading the engineering team to greatness. The challenge that I was presented to was big and risky and right away I knew that I wanted it, that everything that I’ve always worked for would be leading me here and I was confident that I could help Codacy getting even better, deliver a better quality product to its costumers and more and more I would be working in something that I’ve always wished to do, helping to make developers live across the world easier.
Knowing that I already led teams in the past (I hate the term management, that’s so outdated) and as I’d be the second most senior engineer at Codacy we agreed on me joining the team as VP of Engineering, which to Codacy’s needs makes perfect sense at this point.
My main concern when joining Codacy was how would I integrate with the team, and them with me.
And you know what? It’s been awesome!
Keys To A Great Team
Let me disclose some things for you regarding the way that we do things at Codacy that allows for us to have such a great team:
- At Codacy we have a no politics politic — This is result of having a small team abundant with great people. Everyone here has a voice, everyone here is heard.
- At Codacy we value people and our own — we have a no limit vacation policy, anyone can take vacations at any time for the amount of time that they need and no work schedules. (we’re all humans and everyone has different needs) Have I told you that we also have videogames, foosball champs and discretionary food complements?
- At Codacy we will only hire people if the entire team approves — We might find a candidate that has a great profile, that is the ideal person for that role, but the team has final saying, after all we’re all be together during most of our time so we might as well take time to be with people that will have the same driven spirit as ourselves.
Since I’ve joined I had the opportunity to help improving a lot of things since we now have standups and we’re using a new ticketing system that allows to implement Agile the way it fit us the best. I’ve also had the opportunity to tidy up a bit part of our infrastructure and I’m currently learning Scala, which by the way is a very powerful and complete language, so if you have the opportunity give it a try. On the other hand I’ve also had the opportunity to work alongside with the team to improve some of our components architecture and logic, one of which is the new analysis system that now is running in a multitude of times faster than before!
It is amazing to have found such a great team, and I’m sure we’ll be doing great things together!
See you around,
Ricardo
Edit: We just published an ebook: “The Ultimate Guide to Code Review” based on a survey of 680+ developers. Enjoy!
About Codacy
Codacy is used by thousands of developers to analyze billions of lines of code every day!
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