This year I took a bit of time to prepare what I would like to achieve as a software engineer in 2024. Many of my goals are focusing on my current work as Staff Eng @Wolt but not all of them. There are some I decided to include on the list only because of my selfish reasons. Lets dive.
Fintech org @Wolt
During last 6 months I had opportunity to work on multiple project including:
- onboarding flow for merchants including KYC and KYB
- new type of merchant commission
- pricing platform that allows for unified and fine granular breakdown of price calculation for customers, merchants and Wolt
All those projects allowed me to cooperate with different teams. That being said, there is still territory uncharted for me within Fintech org. Invoicing and payouts are two main areas that I would like to understand better and build relationships with teams who own those domains. This will allow me to get a good big picture of the entire org and become more efficient as an engineering leader.
Involvement in hiring
If you know me or you follow my blog you know I’m passionate about hiring. This is something I already started to get involved in. I would like to better understand the bar for engineers and the process for hiring. From what I have seen the process is very candidate friendly (you can read my experience here) but I believe we can do better on evaluating candidates.
Tech deep dive
This year I would like to do a deep dive into two technologies: Kubernetes and databases.
I suck at infrastructure. It was almost always abstracted for me. Because of this I lack a lot of knowledge necessary for running services in the cloud. Wolt uses K8 and I already once faced a situation where due to service not starting I didn’t know how to approach such a situation. I would like to bring my skills around Kubernetes up to date.
As opposed to Kubernetes, my database skills are decent but I never had to look under the hood. Considering this is a tech that we, as engineers, use everyday it makes sense to get a better understanding of it. I heard good things about Databse Internals so I might start there.
Help others be better leaders
Every year I’m organizing small initiatives for my followers at Twitter \ X to help them with their careers. In the past I did CV reviewing and career consulting. This year I would like to go more global instead of focusing on a single platform. I have a few ideas for this year but nothing set in stone just yet.
One idea is to start with public speaking. Work @Wolt allowed me to touch some interesting projects that are worth talking about. The other thing that I’m toying with is preparing a walkthrough for engineering leaders about how to organize what I call “Engineering Discussions”. It’s a session I do with all teams I work with. Engineering Discussions is a meeting where teams can discuss tech, processes and make decisions about ongoing projects in a safe environment. I will describe how to organize those, what to focus on and what benefits you can get from doing this with your team. It should be enough for engineers to decide if they want to give it a try. For those who would like to get ready scenarios to use for an easier start, I will create a fixed length newsletter with detailed info.
Keep writing
I started writing this blog in summer 2023 right after I got laid off from Shopify. I had spare time and decided I would like to share some of my experience around hiring and interviewing. When I started to work for Wolt in September the same year I wasn’t sure I would find time to write anymore. To my surprise I kept my routine of creating short posts (each one of them is less than 700 words). So far I have written 8 blog posts (this one excluded) that generated 900 views within the last 6 months. It ain’t much but it’s honest work. I would like to keep writing in 2024.