When Merrill Bajana, one of our product managers and myself volunteered to take over the hosting of GumGum’s 5th annual Hackathon, it was pre-COVID-19. We began planning for an event in our Santa Monica office, but later made the call to go fully remote this year. We put a lot of thought into how to make 2020 the most successful Hackathon yet — here are some considerations and ideas for hosting a remote hackathon!

We have used Storybook to document our React component library for a while, and although we love it, we’ve had to use various addon packages and do some hacky things to get components to show how we wanted. Storybook has undergone some big versioning changes recently, so I sat down…

On Monday, April 23, GumGum held our first Women Who Lunch event. This recurring event was started to bring women from the tech industry into our office to share their story and answer questions from the women in engineering here at GumGum. Our first lunch featured Tricia Lee, the SVP…

Sanja Stegerer has been working at GumGum as a Data Scientist for past two years. She has worked on various parts of our Natural Language Processing systems. In the talk below, she explains one of the most important systems in GumGum’s NLP systems — The Threat Classification System. The Threat…

At GumGum, my team builds and works on many React JS web applications. As the number of apps grew, we found ourselves writing the same code and components for each app. This is not ideal because we had to spend time writing similar code, and it was not centralized, so each variation might have slight differences. — A few things came together at once for our team: Our UI team created a design system that allowed us to use the same UI styles across all apps.

I manage a team of 4 people responsible for 5 different web products, both internal and B2B. Inspired by a question from Out of Office Hours, here’s what a typical day might look like for me. — 9:30am — Specific product stand up I have 2 stand ups each day. The first is for one of our products. We have representatives from big data, computer vision, and web teams, and it is led by our VP of Product.

As with most first time engineering managers, I headed down a road with not much guidance and hoped for the best. I armed myself with a lot of books, read a lot of blog posts, asked my friends what they liked and didn’t like about their managers, and reflected on my own experiences. Here’s some things I’m trying and learning in this WIP. — Prepare yourself mentally for the switch. You’d think this would be obvious, but it was a shocking adjustment for me when I switched to the management path and realized, “hey, I have to talk to people all day now.” I went from sitting at my computer lost in code most of the day, to talking to…

For a brand new developer, their initial contact with their very first tech job is crucial. They’re probably anxious, nervous, and unsure what to expect. Here are some tips for new developers and their employers to help ease the transition, based on my experience with my first company which I…