DAV Insider: Shahar Frank, R&D Team Leader
Today in our fourth edition of DAV Insider we sit down with our R&D Team Leader, Shahar Frank. Shahar is a Google Certified Data Engineer with nearly twenty years of software development and management experience
What’s your role at the DAV Foundation?
I am an R&D Team Leader.
What does your average workday look like?
I usually start my day checking the github notification in my email. Our community contributors work night and day on enhancing the code. I try to facilitate their work by responding to pull request and requests to claim an issue as quickly as possible. Throughout the day I have various coordination meetings with the team and sometimes with Tal our CTO — keeping him updated on the progress of the team. I am also connected to multiple communication channels (e.g. our Gitter channel, Slack etc..) ready to assist our offshore team and our community contributors as needed. In between I try to get down to coding as much as possible. Towards the end of the day I usually take care of opening new Issues for community contributors to be able to continue the work, even when we are done here for the day.
- What do you feel are your greatest challenges in your role?
Making sure our development effort is kept focused and orderly even though it consists of so many developers, spread remotely and working independently. It is important that we do not lose track of our end goals when fixing issues or adding new features. It’s easy to get immersed in the small details and to later discover we’ve all been heading in the wrong direction.
Tell us a funny, quirky or strange story from work.
I don’t have one yet — strange as that may sound!
Who’s your favourite superhero or fictional character, and why?
My superhero is Leonardo Da Vinci…and I don’t mean the Ninja Turtle named after him. I admire great thinkers and especially those who manage to contribute thoughts and creations over multiple fields of expertise as he has done.
What gets you excited about DAV?
I think DAV has the potential to revolutionize the way transportation works globally. More than just communication, it offers the ability for so many organizations and individuals to partake in transportation and optimize the efficiency of the industry. This in turn might lead to shorter and cheaper service as well as reducing fuel emissions and making the world a safer place in which to live.
