Stories from my Life as a Technologist
organizational culture, work environment
Everyone dreams of talking to someone who can solve their problem. Opening up ways for Support team members to contribute to documentation and code will improve the customer experience and the company’s efficiency and we can prove it!.
Presented at Support Driven Expo 2022. Continue reading “Presentation: Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions”
Fourth anniversary! When I started at GitLab, I was wondering if I’d be here for 2 years, let alone 4 and counting. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend reading the reflection on the first half of my fourth year though it’s not necessary to know what I’ve been up to during the last 6 months specifically, which is covered here. Continue reading “Reflection: Second half of my fourth year at GitLab and becoming Staff”
I recently organized an AMA on Being and Becoming a Staff Support Engineer. This was meant to be similar to last year’s Being/Becoming a Senior Support Engineer. Normally, I would have actually waited longer to do it, since I only got promoted in February and I feel like I haven’t been working at the Staff level very long. However, at the end of May, our other Staff Support Engineer, Will Chandler was transferring to the development team. So, I decided before he transferred would be a good time to have the AMA. Additionally, I invited Drew Blessing, our first Staff Support Engineer (who had transferred to development a couple years ago) to also join the group of people answering questions.
This is not just a summary of the answers from that AMA session though. I’ve tried to put the answers and thoughts together with the previous video that I recorded with Lyle Kozloff while I was still working on becoming Staff, and some additional insights. Continue reading “Summary and Thoughts on Being/Becoming a Staff Support Engineer”
I’ve worked in many types of organizations though mostly in public and non-profit, and it seems particularly in smaller organizations, or in organizations where they’re not building products, documentation is not always seen as necessary. I once asked a manager to attend the Write the Docs conference and they didn’t think it was relevant to my job. Granted, writing documentation was not part of my job description, but I didn’t quite understand how they couldn’t see its importance. Documentation is not just about product documentation. Continue reading “Documentation is important in every organization: Writing down all the things”
I spent 2 weeks being a CEO shadow at GitLab, and thought I’d reflect a bit on my experience. If you’d like a more thorough write up, check out Darren Murph’s takeaways and lessons learned blog post, or check out the CEO Shadow YouTube playlist. Continue reading “Reflection on my CEO shadow rotation at GitLab”