“Sometimes it's best to first take a breath and then make a plan”
Team 50inTech
Dany Badr is a Full Stack Software Engineer at Upflow, where he leads a team of developers working with the company’s marketing and operations departments. He was the second engineer to ever join the company and has witnessed the company’s exponential growth over the last four years. His advice to new developers: don’t jump straight into the code without truly understanding the problem first.
From engineer to manager
I started working at Upflow four years ago. At the time, I was the second engineer to join the company, the CTO being the first. At first, I was working full-time on the software we're selling as a full-stack engineer, developing new features on the app.
Last summer after raising our Series A, the company started growing fast and we decided to create a team fully dedicated to the business side of things. Barnaby, the CTO, asked me to lead this team and hire people to work with me. That’s how I became an engineering lead and a manager.
Expanding the team
Right now, I'm looking for front-end engineers to work within the marketing team, help out with the website and blog, and take care of bugs. More generally speaking, what I look for in a team member is someone that's worked with a stack similar to ours, like React. However, it's important to keep in mind that the framework is really not the most important thing. It’s also about their approach to learning and their soft skills.
It’s important to be able to communicate properly, especially with non-tech people, and to understand the business needs. It's especially true for this frontend engineering person who will be embedded in the marketing team and interact with business teams on a daily basis. They need to understand what they're talking about, and also be able to explain the technicalities.
Another thing I’ve learned over the years is to not rush into the code. At first, when you start as an engineer, you just want to get into coding and start doing stuff. But sometimes it’s better to take a breath and form a plan, a strategy, and understand the impact of what you’re going to build.
Inbound and outbound
At Upflow - and in many B2B startups actually - there are two ways to get new clients. Engineers work on both ways. First, there's inbound, handled by the marketing team I work with. It's about driving traffic and interest to your website and product, rather than having a "push" approach and contacting prospects directly. I work on improving the website, blog pages, and help set up marketing campaigns. Then there's outbound. It’s about helping the sales team by building a system that helps us identify qualified leads at scale.
We use TypeScript across the stack. React in the front-end, and NodeJS in the backend. For the website we use NextJS. We also recently set up a Headless CMS, called Storyblok, for the marketing team to be able to change all the content and create new pages without any involvement from the engineers.
Hit the ground running
Every three weeks, we have an onboarding week for newcomers with workshops given by every team and department. That week is all about integrating newcomers and welcoming them to the team, making sure established team members have lunch with them and everyone really gets to know each other.
Every new team member also gets a dedicated onboarding Kanban containing everything they need to know to hit the ground running at Upflow. Our onboarding guide also includes our anti harassment policy and explains how we communicate with each other respectfully.
The importance of diversity
One of my colleague engineers is colorblind. Without him, we wouldn’t think as much about the accessibility and readability of our designs. He told our designers many times that we needed to improve the contrast on some pages to be more inclusive.
Knowing that 8% of the population has some kind of colorblindness, you can directly see the business impact and the importance of building an accessible app. It’s just one example, but it shows the value of having different people in a team.
Men must be allies
Men play a hugely important role in creating a more inclusive tech industry. We can all be better allies to women in tech. It starts with basic things, like not interrupting women in meetings or using inclusive language in job postings and in daily communication. Spreading awareness about microaggressions in the workplace and the harm they can do is also important.
We should all be aware that imposter syndrome is a real thing among women: many women feel discouraged to apply for a job if they have less than 100% of the required skills. Having a less exhaustive list of “must-haves” vs. “nice to haves” in your job postings can be more encouraging.
As a company, it’s our role to implement policies that will lead the way to gender equality. For example, we can encourage fathers to share parenting duties like picking up children from school. In my point of view, we should also push fathers to take as much parental leave as possible, even if it goes further than what’s planned in the law.
