The interview series with employees of the dataglobal Group
Richein, tell us briefly how you came to the dataglobal Group and what particularly fascinates you about software development.
Hi, I joined dataglobal in January 2019 because I was interested in developing technologies from scratch. Initially, I was an application developer in consulting for a year and then joined the core development teams.
What I love about software development is developing solutions that drive business processes forward and solve problems. For example, creating automation solutions for tasks that nobody wants to do manually. I find it exciting to see how good, scalable solutions that I have worked on are used in practice. It’s just as fulfilling as building something “by hand”, like a carpenter does with wood
Has there been a moment in your career to date that has particularly shaped you or encouraged you in your decision to become a developer?
I would say that was a long time ago, before I started my career. When I was 11 years old, I was already learning programming on my own at home because I was interested in how video games and software are developed. As a teenager, I was already developing small tools and modifications for computer games. It was very fulfilling to see how something I had developed myself worked, and I knew even then that I wanted to become a software developer to develop solutions for practical applications in the real world.
Lately, I would say that the work myself and the rest of our team have been doing on the dgIdentity and customer portal platform, which utilizes modern technologies and techniques, is the highlight so far. It’s a solid foundation that we can build a lot on in the future so that other applications can be connected to it. Eleven with Expurgate is already using it and vysoft is also in the process of using it.
Kevin spoke of a “dedicated team” in the last interview. How do you experience the collaboration in your team on a day-to-day basis?
The collaboration and working as a team is a highlight. We are really flexible and always open and have our own processes for how we work as an agile team, and have done so in the same way for years. Even though we all have our defined roles, each of us wears multiple hats. Most of the time our daily status calls can last up to an hour, but I think they are really useful, everyone is always on the same page, and most of the time we only need that call and everyone can work on their tasks, we rarely have any kind of blocker that hinders development. Of course we have a lot of fun and joke a lot with each other. It’s a very relaxed team with a lot of experience, so you can learn a lot from each other. We are like that in a close-knit team.
What is your typical way of working – do you have certain routines or tools that have proved particularly successful?
I would say we are very dynamic and don’t have too many specific routines. Our daily status meeting 5 days a week is the biggest routine we have. However, we regularly check if we need new routines/processes and usually try something out but quickly realize it may not work. Technically, we have routines to ensure code quality. Every line of source code that we bring into our main development branch is checked by other team members, which is called a “code review”. This means that other team members review the pull requests to identify potential problems and make suggestions, which are of course also used for learning. And our QA team always performs a full set of tests before deployment to production. Before any major implementation of a new feature or change, we conduct a separate brainstorming session that focuses intensively on the architecture.
How do you deal with unexpected technical hurdles as a team – is there an example where you found a particularly creative or pragmatic solution?
Technical hurdles are a natural part of software development, whether expected or unexpected, and I think we’re really good at recognizing potential hurdles that may arise in the future. We try very hard to see the bigger picture before we implement anything, but also in terms of the technological landscape to anticipate potential advantages and disadvantages in the coming years that may arise from using a tech stack, for example, or what potential new technologies or concepts may emerge in the future and how we can best prepare. Things change quickly in the IT world, so you can’t assume that what is appropriate today will still be appropriate in 5 years’ time. We have to plan and build accordingly. Recently we have solved potential performance issues in the future by making some of our services architecturally flexible and strong by using gRPC for inter-service communication, caching and message queues. We have also found a more efficient way to issue tokens in our identity system, similar to using our APIs, but it would be too technical to go into detail here.
If you had one wish for your project or your way of working – what else would you like to try out?
I’m always interested in learning and using new programming languages because many have interesting new ideas or workflows, but it’s not practical to use them in important projects where big programming languages like C#/C++/Go/Java are used instead. Exotic languages come with risks, and of course not everyone in a development team wants to learn yet another new language. For most developers, learning and using these languages is therefore reserved for hobby projects at home for the time being 😊
I have been interested in the Odin programming language for a year now and often use this language for hobby projects in my spare time.
Thank you very much for the interview, Richein!
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