Engineering Profile: Meet Summer
Meet Summer, one of our Senior Engineers at SafetyCulture.
Summer works on complex systems on iAuditor, where she has had some challenging projects to lead.
In her free time she enjoys being creative from home renovation to digital art, painting and crafting, and was a semi-pro Basketball player. She also has a dog (a cross between Poodle and Maltese), called Holiday, who she named after herself :)
When did you join SafetyCulture? What made you join?
I joined SafetyCulture in February 2020.
I really liked that iAuditor was a product used in a wide range of industries, the product has meaning and saves lives. I’m a safety-conscious person and it seemed like the company fit my values. I wanted to be building a meaningful product, and iAuditor is a market leader for safety, with a good company direction, so I thought it was a good time to join a Unicorn startup that is scaling and growing.
What inspired you to take up a career in Tech?
I like to build all kinds of things and I’m always interested in learning how things work.
For example, I work on a lot of home renovation projects, like building concrete table tops and teaching myself through Youtube videos. I find it therapeutic and rewarding.
So for a career choice, building software is a career that lets you build things, learn how things work and keeps you engaged for hours.
At University, I studied Finance and Accounting, and I volunteered on side projects for different groups, such as UNSW Art and the Student Association, where I’d be helping with design, website setup and creating marketing emails. After I graduated, I actually landed a role in Tech, which was initially a marketing role with a bit of design, website design and HTML. I’d also be building Flash animation, landing pages for clients, and small software projects like iOS apps. I really enjoyed game development, and some of my games won in work competitions.
From there, I decided that I wanted to learn Computer Science fundamentals, so I enrolled in a 2 year Tafe course for a Software Programming Diploma as well as learning from peers and colleagues. There was also lots of studying on Udemy and Coursera!
What does your role entail?
My role involves a few areas — applying technical knowledge, designing systems, collaborating with Product Managers as well as other groups in the company, such as Finance and Support.
Over time, I have found that it’s important when designing systems to understand upstream and downstream impact. As a senior engineer, when you are given a design, you need to question why, and see the big picture before implementing. As you progress through your career, you will spend a lot of time on technical design and architecture, and thinking more about infrastructure and workflows.
What was the biggest challenge in your role so far?
When I first joined the company, I started working on a legacy service. We were migrating from one datastore to another technology, and dealing with a legacy system, I had to learn about the system quickly.
Working with the legacy system can be complex and sometimes extremely dangerous, to make it harder, our team was newly formed and there were many unknowns. We spent a significant amount of time investigating, planning, and monitoring to ensure the success of the migration.
Lessons I’ve learned from working on this project were:
- Understand the problem, not just the code. (A problem well-stated is half-solved)
- When working on the legacy system, try TDD (Test-Driven Development) it gives you more confidence in your changes.
- Observability is critical, the faster to identify a problem, the easier to fix it.
- Have a disaster recovery strategy.
The project was complex and required detailed work, to ensure that downstream systems did not experience impacts. We needed to define a plan upfront, such as disaster recovery and releasing to small number of customers
I uncovered flows which complicated how the datastore was being updated as well as risks. I came across challenges with the migration, for example migrating data without downtime and running a dual-system approach. This project wasn’t just a technical challenge, I had to learn about business logic, learn a new tech stack, research and understand how people use the product. I had to come up with an approach on simplifying how data was being modified from multiple sources and ensure consistency.
Observability and having a plan B was also important. By having dashboards and alerts in place, it was faster to troubleshoot, locate issues and fix them. We also proactively built tools to help us in the long term, for example a dashboard tracking incoming requests from systems to track errors which helped us quickly find an error and address this quickly. It would’ve taken longer to trawl logs to find the issue.
How have you found being a female in tech in general?
Sometimes I find I need more confidence in myself. For example I approach problems differently. I want to make sure it’s fully thought through, cover different scenarios, think about 100 ways to break it, and make sure it is well presented before sharing with others. If I contrast this to most male engineers, they are better at asking for feedback early — they have an idea, ask for feedback and can correct gaps and progress quickly because of this. If they make a mistake, they naturally have more confidence and move on. Whereas I find that I think about why.
However, I also think being a female engineer also has good points. Females tend to think through details end to end. Thinking through details is important, where we can find hidden problems which get missed. I also find that I am more approachable, so that means I can leverage communication skills, collaborate with engineers in other teams, and make progress on projects because of these skills.
Why do you think there is still a gap for the number of women in tech?
The technology industry might has traditionally been labeled as a male-dominated industry, however, I do notice more talented female engineers had been joining the battle and championing in all areas. I do believe that women have a huge potential in the tech, and I can’t wait to witness more and more women taking on the leadership roles and changing the world.
What advice would you give others who are interested in a career in Tech?
If you have a passion to learn new things, build products that influence people and make people’s lives better, being in Tech is a good industry. Also, technology changes quickly and you will be constantly learning.
To be a successful engineer, there are a few common attributes
- Strong desire to deliver above expectations
- Desire to achieve goals
- Grow others by learning from and teaching others
- Connect what you are building to the company and impact on the customer
Last tip — keep thinking about ways to impact your team, company and bigger communities. Your work makes other people’s lives easier and is a contribution to society.
At SafetyCulture, we are excited to come to work and the value we bring to the business. We are hiring!
