Life as a Software Engineer at Signal
by Aris Triantafyllou, Software Engineer
A day in the life
Engineering is all about designing and building blocks of code without forgetting the need to consume a decent amount of caffeine while doing that. My day starts with a cup of tea at hand while attending our morning stand-up. There isn’t too much standing taking place these days due to the whole Covid situation but that does not stop us from keeping the quality of the online stand-ups high.
I am a member of the Scraping team and we are responsible for our Signal Ocean platform being able to read over 30.000 emails per day. That’s not an easy feat. We strive to extract meaningful information from a huge variety of formats and types of reports and read it on the fly, to allow for live use of that information by our clients. The high quality of the extracted information, the practically infinite formats of information scraped (emails, slack messages, attachments of all kinds) and the need for live use of these, defines a problem that is mind-boggling.
Every day and every Wave (Waves are the quarter-equivalents we use in Signal to split our annual work into periods of time where we plan, execute, and evaluate), the goal is to deliver consistent and quality results while making sure no one is left behind. We pride ourselves on making sure that all team members contribute solid and valuable work while they get the most learnings out of this experience. And we have managed to do that by developing a planning process based on best practices, one that is based on a dialogue between management and each team member and incorporates every employee’s input in the goal-setting and planning process. Of course, this is not easy, given the ever-evolving state of the product, yet it does not seem to slow us down.
This culture is also reflected in how dev teams are organised following Microservices architecture, where a collection of small autonomous services communicate with each other to bring life to a respective business logic. A plethora of tools contribute to this such as Kubernetes, a container management tool and Postman for the API development. Some other awesome tools I am using along with the corresponding technologies they are used for are Visual Studio as my main IDE for all C#/.NET related projects, SQL Server Management Studio for all SQL related stuff, Git Bash for version control, Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer, Visual Studio Code, RedisDesktopManager and InfluxDB Studio.
The rest of the day is just a combination of collaborative and personal work on various team or personalized tasks, attending meetings and overall working on planning, software development, fixing issues etc. I like taking short breaks every couple of hours mainly for stretching and at around 2pm it’s time for lunch. During Covid times, our tools have also become our socializing assistants, so we try to use them wisely enough to replace coffee breaks and walking conversations in general. Finally at around 7pm, I step back and before leaving my desk I check my daily progress, again gathering and organising tasks already done or planned for the coming days.
In a company like Signal, where we have to break new ground, technical challenges are the daily norm and it is always so very interesting to test your skills and see if you can get things done the right way to make sure the product evolves and flourishes. We all know that one of the biggest issues of dev work is struggling to solve something that seems challenging at first glance. The other day, for example, I was assigned the task to replace some old synchronous HTTP calls in one of our projects with an asynchronous queue-based Microservices architecture. The challenging part was that the whole project actually needed a big refactor to support increased throughput and resource utilization, so I ended up restructuring core parts of code by taking into account official documentations along with similar implementations and advice from other team members. While there are actually no cool ways to resolve issues, being part of a cool team is enough. Having colleagues with many years of experience and expertise creates a feeling that no matter what gets thrown at us, we will handle it with ease. All devs know how rare and invaluable that is!
Teamwork and fun go together
But the good stuff doesn’t stop at the team level. The company, as a whole, really puts in the effort to make us feel appreciated. From the very first day in Signal, it feels as if everyone is surrounded by people with the same vision and passion, people with warmth and joy always ready to lend a helping hand and hear you out. For new team members, the company has created a 2 to 4 week-long induction training (depending on the role), where you get to meet about 30 trainers/managers while you are taking the time to dive deep into the product and the shipping world. Personally, I find myself excited at the start of every day at Signal, ready to have fun with my team and enjoy the view from our Glyfada premises terrace. Obviously the terrace, along with other in-person team activities (such as Hackathons, ping pong tournaments, cocktail and ice cream days) are a pre-Covid perk, but I have high hopes that we will be there once again soon enough.
Even during Covid times, Signal cared enough to make remote work more comfortable by giving us ergonomic chairs (besides just allowing us to take dual screens and peripherals at home), creating online team events, such as virtual escape rooms, cooking class, ergonomics training and weekly workout sessions. We even did a virtual vasilopita cutting this year and had the cake pieces safely handled and delivered at home!!! These are small but meaningful surprises that make you feel you are not some resource forgotten at home. Instead, it really helps keep us all connected no matter the team we belong to and helps a lot our productivity and good mood.
All in all, the combination of product innovation, a comfortable working environment and wonderful colleagues is what makes me enjoy work and life at Signal. Being part of a team with such strong dynamics, I always try to get the most out of my colleagues in terms of knowledge and experience. It is no exaggeration to say that I admire all of my colleagues for their strong talents in software development and data analysis, but most importantly for their ungrudging support and team spirit.
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