A New Kind of Tech
Two weeks ago, I joined Planning Labs! I now have a civil service title, a “.gov” email address, and 5 teammates. Before this, I was working as a software engineer for an AdTech company. I had catered lunch on Fridays, an impressive array of in-office events, and 600+ engineering co-workers. I had a wonderful experience at my last job; I learned so much and am so grateful for the time I spent there. But in my short time here, it’s clear that lot of things are very different. At the end of Week Two, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what has changed. This feels like a totally new kind of tech.
Access To End Users
Here at Planning Labs, we are embedded right inside the organization that also employs a huge chunk of the people we are building things with. In two weeks, I have attended three meetings with end users. I was literally sitting in a room, demoing new features and talking through behaviors, with the people who use our web applications! No back and forth with client support, trying to translate implementation limitations into reasonable requirements. No blurry image in my mind of who benefits from all this coding.
So far, it seems like this really reduces friction in the iteration cycle. Of course, we’re lucky to be building things with a kind and collaborative group of people who are grateful for the solutions we’re providing. In a world with scary, demanding customers, I’m sure it’d be wonderful to hide behind a team of product managers who can protect you from unreasonable deadlines and outsize expectations. But to me right now, having this kind of access is purely exciting. We can change an interaction or workflow, and know immediately if it makes more sense to the customer. We can compromise in real time about dream features and reasonable engineering tasks. We can build better and faster because we have access to such great feedback.
Not to mention the added benefit of being able to put real faces to the abstract “customer.” After years of writing code to meet the demands faceless corporate clients, it is so exciting to be able to meet a real person and know their life will be made easier by the tools we’re building. I have loved hearing from colleagues about real projects and problems in New York City that will be solved with the solutions we’re providing. It makes it feel that much better to be writing all this code and making all these things.
Commitment to Contributing Back
Part of what Planning Labs is all about is to show there is a place in government for modern technology and iterative, user-focused development practices. We’re committed to transparency and openness in our own projects, and rely heavily on other open source technologies to enable rapid development. As a small team with a lot of deadlines, it would be easy to zone in on our goals and spend 100% of our working hours on Planning Labs tasks. But here I am, 12 days in to my new job, drafting a blog post. I’ve got a branch going working on a fix for a bug in an open source technology we’re using in our deploy process. I’ve attended a meeting with the team brainstorming how we can increase technical literacy across the organization and empower everyone to contribute to the products we build with them. I RSVPed to an emberJS meetup that I’m attending with some teammates.
Compared to my previous job, we’re a tiny team working on a very specific problem set. But the spaces we’re participating in are so varied. From the civic tech world we’re a part of, which spans states and countries including government organizations across the globe, to the open-source web application development world, the mapping and geo-vis world, the public open data world — the communities we are participating in are vast. Not to mention, it feels great to know there’s a commitment to contributing back to these sources that are helping us to learn and achieve so much. Not only do we improve our processes by leveraging awesome open source tools, we’ll also hopefully make some of those tools better for the next people who come along to use them. Not only will I gain new technical skills, I’ll also hopefully create content that enables other to learn as well.
I’m still settling in at Planning Labs and definitely have a lot to learn, first and foremost — how to twitter (@jh___nyc).
The shift from my old working environment will certainly pose some challenges. Sadly, “ask Devops” will no longer be a valid solution when a server is misconfigured or an integration unexpectedly breaks, because we own all that. At some point I will wish I could just tell a project manager to tell some amorphous idea of a client that we simply will not be delivering a crazy feature request. And yes, I’ll miss Friday lunch. But if these past 14 days are any indicator, I can’t wait for what’s to come.
