Leaders in Tech: Matt Rees
Welcome to our Leaders in Tech editorial series. Speaking to leaders in the industry to capture their stories, career highs and lows, their trials and successes, their current company and their role, most recent projects, advice to others, and the individuals who they most look up to in the industry. This week, we talked to Matt Rees, Digital Solution Architect at BT, to find out more about why he joined the tech industry, what his role entails, what are the challenges he faces as a tech leader, and his advice to aspiring engineers and developers. First of all, could you introduce yourself and your current role? I’m Matt Rees a Solution Architect at BT Digital working in the Consumer division – we build and maintain all the digital products for BT’s Consumer brands (BT, EE, and PlusNet). Can you tell me about your journey in technology? I went to university to study Audio and Music Technology at the University of the West of England (UWE) which is a new university in the city of Bristol, UK. I’d chosen that course as I wanted to become a sound engineer. On the first day the course leader said if we wanted to be sound engineers, we should “go and be someone’s tea boy in a recording studio … and that we were at university to learn about the technology that underpins sound and music”. That was 2008 which was a big year in mobile development as iPhoneOS 2.0 launched. Most people don’t remember that when the first iPhone launched in 2007 it only had the default Apple software. iPhone OS 2.0 saw the launch of the App Store where developers could build custom software “Apps”. I saw the iPhone as the natural evolution of the iPod – the defining piece of music technology of my generation so being able to add custom software to this seemed to me like the perfect intersection of music and technology. At university, I learned the basics of C and C++ building audio plugins, in my final year I began learning Objective-C so I could build iPhone apps. UWE is the newer and smaller university in Bristol but whereas it can’t compete with Bristol university’s heritage and research status it was very good at preparing students for work. So much so that one module even required us to build a digital product for a local company. I managed to convince my friends that we should build an iPhone app for a local football website and so my journey into professional development began. Once I’d graduated the university secured me an internship at a local digital agency building mobile apps and over the course of the last 11 years I’ve worked for a number of agencies across the UK building apps for brands including Jet2, McCain, and UK Greetings. After a few years, I decided to switch from being agency side to being client-side and saw that EE was hiring. EE sold iPhones so it seemed a natural fit for a place to go and make iPhone apps. BT then purchased EE. What inspired you to get involved in the IT industry? It’s great to be able to build something that people are using. It’s similar to music when all the parts come together and you can see people enjoying the song it can be really rewarding. Having an idea and being able to build that and have it come to life is the main reason I started coding. What is the favorite part of your job? I love learning, so being in such a fast-paced industry where you’re constantly having to learn new skills is really enjoyable, it can be stressful always having to stay on top but as you get more experienced you learn when and how to pick up new tools. According to you, what makes a good leader in the industry? Empathy – leading a team is both about being great with technology and making sound decisions but also appreciating that everyone has their own lives with their own circumstances. Those circumstances could be anything from having a newborn baby, a relationship breaking down, or a family member being sick. Being able to support your team by helping them through those moments will pay dividends in the long run. What are some of the challenges you faced during your career? One of the earliest challenges was the perception of not having a computer science or software engineering degree meant I didn’t know how to code. This is where having a portfolio of projects I’d worked on really helped. I produced fully working apps that helped me learn the basics of coding. Software engineering can be taught on the job and each company has different standards anyway so never be afraid to apply for a job that you think is above you. You can teach standards, but you can’t replace passion. What are you the proudest of in your career so far? When our app (My EE) hit number 3 in the App Store charts for Utilities (behind Google Chrome and Google Search) that was really rewarding to see. Do you have goals for the future? I’d love to be involved in making software engineering more environmentally friendly. In my spare time, I build the website for Protect Our Winters UK where we help passionate outdoor people become effective climate advocates to achieve systemic solutions to climate change. Do you have any advice for aspiring engineers and testers? Start now. There is so much great content (both free and paid) out there start making mistakes now. Mistakes are how we learn and get better, it’s better to make lots of small mistakes and keep continuously improving than it is to be the perfect first time.
Leaders in Tech: Saul Zarrate
Welcome to our Leaders in Tech editorial series. Speaking to leaders in the industry to capture their stories, career highs and lows, their trials and successes, their current company and their role, most recent projects, advice to others, and the individuals who they most look up to in the industry. This week, we talked to Saul Zarrate, Head of Delivery at Altamira, to find out more about why he joined the tech industry, what his role entails, what are the challenges he faces as a tech leader, and his advice to aspiring engineers and developers. Could you introduce yourself and your current role? My name is Saul Zarrate – I am the Head of Delivery for an American start-up called Altamira. Can you tell me about your journey and how you got where you are now? Having studied Computer Science and Systems Engineering, I spent most of my early life coding (mainly caffeinating while battling Java and Oracle). While doing that, I became aware that my strongest fortitude lay in leading IT teams, managing clients and customers, and explaining IT to non-IT people. This mix naturally led me to become an IT manager. What inspired you to get involved in the IT industry? Honestly? It was a great accident. My older brother studied Computer Science as well, so we had a PC in our house, which I would play games on (for many hours!). However, an element that is a better answer for this is that I liked abstracting information, structuring data, and solving problems; in other words, I was a math geek! This blend put me in IT. Having said all this, once I got to understand IT at University and then at work, I became super passionate about the ability to make things easier for people via the power of automation (which technology provides). Elon Musk talks about how IT can be seen as magic, i.e. if you were going to describe it to someone from a century ago, they would think that you are a sorcerer – that’s the magic of IT! Why did you decide to specialize in DevOps and Agile? What do you like about it? It was first introduced to me in 2010; like many, I was initially skeptical since it sounded like a hippie fashionable concept. The fancy names and the purism injected into these ways of working didn’t help either. I realized, however, that the difference was not so much on the tooling, the processes, or even the practices, but the approach itself. These ideologies are very team-oriented, and are all about simplicity and user-centricity – all this resonated and still resonates with me after more than 10 years of learning and practicing. Do you have a favorite part of your job? Not just one, but I often think about the adrenaline rush that comes from transforming seemingly impossible challenges into a deliverable that provides value to a user/customer. Team collaboration is a formidable tool to change something unthinkable into something tangible. According to you, what makes a leader in the industry? In my opinion, the answer to this question is a combination of several simple answers. Savvy IT leaders don’t have just one or even a handful of skills; they have a combination of many. I will miss some, but here are a few that come to mind: Understand that collaboration, inclusivity, and diversity are key to building great software. Strive to do more with the same, or less. Seek to automate, build templates, re-use, etc. Question stuff, e.g. Do deployments take more than an hour? We have a problem then. Do products take months to launch? We lack simplifying, etc. Understand that the most important decision is to hire the right people. By bringing in the right people, your project is already 60-70% closer to success. Know that it takes an optimal combination of cultural fit and technical competence to find the right team members. Play an infinite game but are pragmatic and results-oriented. Strive to improve team throughput/velocity over time. Have accountability. When something goes wrong, they acknowledge it right away, apologize, and share some learnings from it. Start with the customer in mind and then retrospectively find an IT solution to meet a need/opportunity (most IT people start with IT and try to fit it, into the customer!). Are empathetic. Are able to understand the other party’s perspective, whether it’s a customer, peer, or teammate. Understand that being in charge of people means looking after them. Show genuine interest for the humans in their team, challenge them, respect them, support them, and coach them to do/be better. Help to achieve 2 to 3 company business goals. As humans, we are drawn to details, which is why we get obsessed and distracted – ultimately, all that really matters in a company is stuff you can count with your fingers. Are altruistic. Make everything about the team, ensure the team is recognized, get excited about it, fight for them – never run teams with an ego. I am sure I am missing a few, but the point is that just ticking one or a few, doesn’t make you a good leader. The compounded combination of many little things like these is what savvy IT leaders share. What are some of the challenges you faced during your career? I lost key people on a high-profile project, seriously compromising its completion. Our team culture allowed others to step up, do the impossible, and cover as a team. Remarkably we managed to deliver the project in the end. I once worked for an egocentric and uninspiring manager. This taught me about my own resilience capacity despite toxic situations as well as about setting boundaries, which we tend to forget when we try to prove ourselves. I have managed people with mental health issues and had to let people go. Finding the sweet spot between ‘it’s just a business, not personal‘ and ‘they are people with families, lives, etc’ was challenging, but,
Leaders in Tech: Alan Rana
Welcome to our Leaders in Tech editorial series. Speaking to leaders in the industry to capture their stories, career highs and lows, their trials and successes, their current company and their role, most recent projects, advice to others, and the individuals who they most look up to in the industry. This week, we talked to Alan Rana, DevOps Engineer, to find out more about why he joined the tech industry, what his role entails, what are the challenges he faces as a tech leader, and his advice to aspiring engineers and developers. Could you introduce yourself and your current role? My name is Alan Rana. I am a DevOps engineer at Automation Logic. Automation logic is a consultancy company specialising in DevOps and cloud transformation and delivery. In my current role, I’m working with major public sector clients to help them adopt DevOps best practices in their cloud architecture and migration work. My current team is involved in migrating, supporting, and monitoring legacy applications onto the cloud. Can you tell me about your journey and how you got where you are now? I did my undergraduate and master’s in mechanical engineering. However, it was during my master’s when I realised mechanical engineering was not something I was interested in anymore. I started getting more interested in the IT industry, with coding, automation, and cloud computing. I knew the future would be very interesting in the IT industry so I wanted to get involved. I wasn’t fully sure which part of IT I wanted to specialise in as I was fairly new to the IT world at this point and I was fascinated by pretty much everything! I wanted to learn a bit of everything in the IT industry and that’s when I found the perfect Graduate DevOps role at Automation Logic. Automation Logic has a DevOps academy program where they hold 3 months of intense training, which includes programming languages such as python, cloud computing, Kubernetes, and many more DevOps topics! This was an amazing learning opportunity for me to get a taste of the technologies and sectors within IT. It was the perfect step into the IT and DevOps industry. And I haven’t regretted it and I have loved it ever since. What inspired you to get involved in the IT industry? As mentioned above, I realised I had lost my passion and interest in mechanical engineering during my master’s degree and started to look for an alternative route. Just like the majority of students, I decided to try to come up with a start-up business and wanted to create a car-sharing application. This is when my interest in the IT industry started. During my research into creating an application, it was fascinating to see how codes worked, how it was all automated, and how certain applications were hosted and maintained in a cloud platform. Unfortunately, my car-sharing application didn’t work out (like many ideas), however, it made me realise I wanted to get into the IT industry. More specifically, it made me interested in cloud computing, writing infrastructure as code, and automating as much as possible. It was amazing to see how processes were getting automated. Hours of work were reduced to minutes, all because it was captured correctly and strategically in code which was triggered by a few commands rather than long manual steps. Why did you decide to specialise in DevOps? I wanted to specialise in DevOps as I was noticing how big cloud computing was getting. I was noticing the benefits of Companies migrating to the cloud; more efficiency, decreasing costs, scalability, etc. And I wanted to be involved in this exciting process. Also, I always liked the idea of being involved in the application lifecycle process. From the applications development to deployment in production. Being in a “DevOps” role allowed me to have the flexibility to get involved in the different lifecycle phases of an application. From working with the developers in the development phase, migrating and deploying it to the cloud, working with the testing & security team all the way to monitoring & analytics of the application in production. Do you have a favorite part of your job? One of my favorite parts of my job is when I’ve been stuck with a code error for a long time or my team has received an alarm for fault with the application/infrastructure and after the debugging session we manage to fix it, that feeling of success and breakthrough is always amazing! I also enjoy being part of “show and tell” sessions where I can share my knowledge and experience on a certain task with the team. What are some of the challenges you faced during your career? So far, one of the most challenging works I’ve faced is trying to migrate legacy applications to the cloud whilst trying to implement the DevOps “working ways” for a client that is attached to certain technologies or concepts that they have stuck with for a while. It can be difficult to introduce new technologies or concepts. (Have to be prepared for the tough questions that may come your way). Also, as a consultant, it’s always difficult to switch and adapt to different technologies that different clients are using. Although this may be difficult, it is also rewarding to learn new technologies. What are you the proudest of in your career so far? A big proud moment for me so far is being part of a team involved in a full-scale migration of legacy applications and databases into the cloud, for a large government department. We have currently completed 90% of the migration. Since migrating to AWS, we have seen roughly 35% less spending in the first few months of migration, with even more to come once we’ve fully migrated and during the “improve phase” where we will continue to monitor the applications, and improve and reduce more unnecessary cost. It’s also a proud feeling to see how much the client engineers have improved. Many
