Meet Eli Zoller, Software Engineer at Goalbook
Eli has always been interested in libraries, so upon completing his Master’s degree of Library and Information Science, he worked on software-related tasks in libraries at higher education institutions. This work and experience eventually led him to get a Master’s degree in Computer Science as well.
When it came time for him to branch out of higher education, Eli wanted to work in an education-related position that he felt was contributing to the good in the world. This led him to Goalbook. As part of the Software Engineering team, Eli makes an impact and supports Goalbook’s mission by building the software special education teachers use. In this Q&A, Eli tells us about his role as a software engineer and what he enjoys about working at Goalbook.
1. What attracted you to Goalbook’s mission?
I liked that Goalbook is an EdTech company because I knew I wanted to stay in the education sphere due to my previous work in higher education.
In both my own experience in education and with having young kids in school, I have seen kids who learn slightly differently get pushed aside. So, I also liked the diversity and inclusion piece of the mission where we’re helping ALL students succeed. That’s important to me, and we live out diversity and inclusion internally and in the work externally.
“We live out diversity and inclusion internally and in the work externally.”
2. What is your role, and what are your favorite parts of it?
I contribute to the software that is our product and the internal tools and infrastructure that uphold that software. I also help with security and protecting our systems, infrastructure, and data.
One favorite part is that we’re full stack. When someone says to me, “Build this,” I get to think through the whole thing: planning, defining the timeline, and breaking down the tasks. I like that we have input on project plans and that we review each other’s work on the Engineering team.
3. What does your day to day look like?
It depends on where we are in our quarterly cycle, which looks like this:
- Prioritization Week: We work with other teams to determine what projects we will work on in that quarter. At the end of the week, we assign the projects to engineers.
- Planning Week: Each engineer goes in-depth to plan their projects, meet with stakeholders, clarify scope, and identify risks.
- Execution Weeks: We have eight execution weeks. During these weeks, we build things and deploy them.
- Reflection Week: After building and deploying projects, we reflect on what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we might want to work on in the next quarter.
- Growth Week: During this week, we have time to learn something new for professional development.
I think the week of reflection and the week of growth are pretty unique to Goalbook. Having time to reflect is pretty typical for software engineering, but there usually isn’t much time dedicated to it. In my prior experience, I may have had an hour to reflect, not a whole week.
I’ve also never experienced this much growth time repeatedly built into a work cycle. Sometimes we’ll have a theme given to us of what to learn about; for example, something related to scalability. Other times it’s totally open, and we can pick whatever we want to learn about. We do a growth share at the end of the week and share with the team what we learned and how it’s relevant to Goalbook.
“I think the week of reflection and the week of growth are pretty unique to Goalbook.”
4. What are one or two things you love here?
The culture at Goalbook is unique, and that stems from our core values of growth and relationships. People actually care about each other and remember things about each other’s personal lives and bring them up in conversations. This makes you feel like people care about you.
I love that we’re fully remote. This allows us to be wherever we need to be for our families or whatever other life circumstances come up.
5. What have you learned in your role so far?
Coming into Goalbook, I didn’t know the programming language Go, so I’ve learned that. I had helpful tutorials on it during my onboarding. The best way for me to learn a programming language is to have a problem in that language and try to solve it, so I continued to learn it through problem-solving.
Additionally, we’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do to scale our services and infrastructure as more educators use Goalbook Toolkit. So I have also learned a ton about both infrastructure and scalability.
6. What’s your favorite memory during your time at Goalbook?
At Goalbook’s Summer Week in June 2023, our engineering team activity was going sea kayaking. It was interesting because the kayaks were tandem kayaks, and we were out in the ocean. There were a lot of waves, so we really had to work with the other person in the kayak to not fall over. It was a really good team-building experience. It was also cool to see the ocean wildlife.
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