Meet our Technical Lead, Andrew — Introducing the Koala Digital Team
Our next interviewee is our Technical Lead, Andrew Sladen. Andrew has been working at Koala since the very beginning — 3 years ago. He built our middleware system; Gumleaf, which connects Shopify to our shipping providers and inventory warehouses as well as many other third party integrations — think of it like ‘software glue’. Andrew works remotely 5 days a week but dials in to stand-ups, meetings and chats with us on Slack. We do get the rare treat of seeing him in the office when we go out for a team lunch or team event.
What exciting project are you working on at the moment?
So many to choose from! We are opening a new Warehouse in Japan. It’s really satisfying to see all the effort I put into making our system scalable for our AU region paying off, and we’re able to make our logistics systems and processes work for this new warehouse for Japan with minimal development; primarily just configuration changes.
I’m recently completed work on the last manual segment of our delivery booking system, so it is now entirely automated. Due to the limitations of our off-the-shelf sales channel and inventory management systems, it can get rather complicated but it will be extremely satisfying to have it done and know that a lot of data entry errors will be removed from our day-to-day.
I’m also proud of the ‘javascript hacks’ and customisations I’ve done to our Shopify checkout. It’s really fun as well. I reckon it could be one of the most tricked-out checkouts around.
What do you like about working for Koala?
Many things again. I’ve been fortunate enough to watch the company grow from almost the beginning, and to build a really interesting software system (Gumleaf) from scratch, when nothing of suitable complexity and configurability could be found at the time. I love working on Gumleaf, adding efficiencies to it, sometimes identifying and solving problems without anyone noticing. Backend work is funny like that, very different to frontend where the customer’s eyes are on it all the time. Frontend is constantly getting exposure and bugs can be caught easily. Whereas errors in backend can go wrong really subtly and sometimes no one would notice until weeks later. When it does finally explode into the open, numerous weeks worth of damage can be done.
When you’re working on backend automation, it feels like crafting a precision timepiece. It’s what I’ve enjoyed the most and have found myself drawn to in my career.
Another great thing about this job is working with some really switched-on developers. All our developers have great analytical brains, and workshopping a problem with other skilled people who have an ‘engineering’ brain is great. It’s a nice change of pace from “translating technical solutions for a non-technical audience”.
Describe what a typical day looks like for you in the digital team
I’m very fortunate to be able to work remotely as I live a few hours away from the Koala office. I used to rent a really funny-looking old office space so that I wasn’t working out of my living room and had somewhere to go each day. But I have recently moved and so now I work in my home office. My normal day is getting up, having a coffee, reading a bit of news, and then sitting in front of my 4 lovely screens to start the work day. We have a stand-up at 9:15am which I dial into and afterwards, I work on Gumleaf, and Shopify checkout customisations. There is sometimes a constant stream of questions on Slack which come from all over the business, so I am constantly juggling between this and keeping focussed on my work. People tend to think it must be annoying, but I like to address the needs of the Koala team. I give task assignments and guidance to Sankar, who also works on Gumleaf remotely.
How is Koala different to the previous places you’ve worked and what motivated you to join koala?
Koala is the first startup I’ve worked for, and I really enjoyed the wild-west nature when it was small. We’ve been through quite a bit of growth, and along with that comes structure and formalisation of processes. It’s easy to complain about these changes, and look back wistfully at the old days but I like to see the positives in our growth. Being exposed to and a part of modern management practices, working on challenging projects, as well as having more interesting people to work with, are only possible because of how big we’ve gotten.
In 2016, I originally joined Koala as a contractor and became an employee in May 2018. Our co-founder Dany, saw my profile on Upwork and reached out, and within a few days I was writing the first lines of Gumleaf. It makes me happy those lines are still in there!
What do you do to get to know your team better?
It’s not my strong-suit, I can be a bit of a robot and mostly just talk on Slack. I suppose the thing I do which is most toward-that-end is come into the office every couple of weeks, steal the desk of whoever is out of office and pretend to be them for that day.
Koala is an Australian startup based in Sydney with a passion for changing the furniture buying experience online because life’s too short to worry about dumb stuff like wasting a whole day waiting for the delivery guy or whether 20 minutes in a showroom was enough to make an educated decision…
Try Koala today at koala.com.
