I was reflecting on different points in my career, where I felt “safe” in my team. The environments were supportive and collaborative. If you made a mistake, you learnt from the experience rather than being blamed or reprimanded. This was an environment where I learnt quickly and thrived.
Why
Let’s backtrack. Why should you care about creating a safe space (psychological safety) for your team?
Here are a few scenarios to ponder:
- Have you encountered a time when your environment consisted of problems, how did that impact your focus?
- Have you encountered a time when you weren’t heard or your ideas…
This is a quick post that will cover observability and instrumentation, a technique that can be used in monitoring applications.
This post will cover a few implementations and will not cover everything out there or recommend one of the other to you. Additionally each language and tech stack may have it’s own recommended toolset.
Let’s start with a definition
What is observability?
Simply put, it’s the ability to measure the internals of a system.
What’s monitoring?
This is when you are monitoring the application. For example, pinging a healthcheck endpoint to know if a system is up.
Why is this important?
Being able to monitor your application is a part of ensuring the reliability…
Why
What makes a healthy team? Why does this matter?
What is empowerment and the correlation with a well functioning team?
Leadership can feel as though you’re steering a ship and navigating with challenges that continually arise.
You work to align people, communicate and resolve these challenges, while trying to maintain a happy and high performing team.
Reflecting on environments where people were happiest, these had a strong correlation with high empowerment, sharing traits like:
- Understanding Why
- Trust and Psychological Safety
- Supportive and Positive Environment
- Opportunities for Growth
- Ownership of Decisions and Consequences
- Recognition
I’ll share examples and practical techniques that…
When I started coding professionally I wanted to write perfect code because that’s what I thought a great developer was. However I quickly learned that there is more to software development than just writing great code.
The question of “What makes a good developer?” is a subjective question and you will get different answers when you ask different people. For me, this is an opportunity to show others that there is more to just writing code.
In this article I will share my views on what I see contributes to being a good developer — inspired by my experience, things…
With the popularity of platforms like Meetup.com, communities have been able to grow and allow like-minded people to meet. For the Tech community, some groups have flourished and offered their members opportunities like coaching and mentoring as well as sharing ideas and knowledge. I’m going to cover my experience, how it’s shaped and grown me, what I’ve seen and how people can learn or be a part of a Tech Community.
From the beginning
I want to begin with how I got into Tech and my first experience with computers. Unlike most kids today, a computer wasn’t common growing up. The first computer…
Meet Alty, one of our Senior Quality Engineers at SafetyCulture, who joined the team 2.5 years ago. Since joining she has expanded her experience working across teams, from a Product team to our Platform Engineering team.
How long have you been at SafetyCulture?
I joined SafetyCulture back in September 2018.
How have you found the experience of being at SafetyCulture?
After being in the company for 2.5 years, I am happy that I have been exposed to a number of technical and personal challenges, as well as learning opportunities that I was given.
What made you decide to be in Tech?
After completing my bachelor of Computer & Communications Engineering, it was a natural choice to go down an Engineering path. However, I didn’t want…
What skills do Engineers need to progress in their careers?
No matter where you are in your career, this question is often asked by Engineers. In my role, where I now guide career development goals and plans, this question still gets asked in conversations I’ve had with Engineers.
I’ll be looking into the skills path covering 3 levels — Junior, Mid to Senior. From Senior Engineer onwards, people will often face a choice of Technical path or Manager path, which is a topic for another day.
I’ll break down the skills needed for these roles and describe what types of…
Hello, thanks for stopping by!
We’re always looking for topics to share with our community, to inspire, grow our skills and help each other.
Topics
We’re on the lookout for technical and non-technical topics, which can cover Career Development, Mentoring, D&I, Coding, STEM, Design, Product, pretty much anything relevant to someone’s career in Technology.
Example topics:
- Goal setting and personal development
- Tutorials on a technology or framework
- How to mentor others
- Accessibility and best practises
- What skills are needed to transition to being a leader
Tips for Writing
- Intro: Your intro is a way to draw the reader in, so give a brief introduction…
Meet George, one of our Engineers at SafetyCulture.
Dog lover and owner (owner of a husky), brunch enthusiast, likes to cook, and addicted to good coffee. George has been involved in STEM at SafetyCulture and passionate about providing opportunities for Engineers joining the industry.
When did you join SafetyCulture?
Mid-October 2019. I joined SafetyCulture a day before my birthday! 🎉
What made you decide to be a Software Engineer?
I was taught to fix up my family’s PC by a family friend when I was a kid. Since then I became really fascinated by technology in general. …
It’s Christmas and at the end of every year, I do a few things — revisiting goals, learning, relaxing, seeing family and friends and making something fun.
For this year, I’ve chosen to dive into an IoT project, to program my LIFX lightbulb. I’ve been eyeing the smart light for many months, and decided to use this project as an excuse to experiment.
The Idea
I find that I often fall asleep reading, so I wanted to automatically switch off my light at a particular time everyday.
I’ll be using Python to code a simple example and deploy the solution to Heroku.
…
Claire Tran
Engineering Manager (Ruby, Java, Elixir) | Crafter | Traveller. Lives: London/Sydney. Passionate about growing opportunities for people in Tech.
