How an experienced FAANG engineer is intentionally building the future of web3
Sharing knowledge and collaborating is key. If you ping someone on the team and ask them a question they’ll help you 1:1. There’s no gatekeeping or judgement and it enables us to learn so much faster in a safer space.—Jorge Dalmendray, Software Engineer at thirdweb.
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb
My name is Jorge, I’m a Software Engineer. For most of my career I’ve worked on mobile environments either native iOS or React native. I work on mobile SDKs—right now, we’re working on building native SDKs for Android and iOs.
What values and team principles of the engineering team resonate the most with you?
There are a few that resonate with me — firstly, we ship in small batches. So, we don’t wait to have the full blown product. Our motto is to ship, get feedback, and continue iterating.
We operate with a no BS culture! Everyone is open to feedback and knows what to do. There’s no politics involved, which was one of the reasons I wanted to join thirdweb.
We aspire for excellence. Most people I work with are really great engineers.
We are very driven, everyone is dedicated to thirdweb’s success, so they do everything they can to progress each other forward with a high sense of ownership.
How does thirdweb view engineering?
It’s the core of the company. We have a strong relationship with our product team and our developers, too. So they know to come to us to ask questions. Marketing and sales do the same. Being a developer focused company we drive a lot of the discussions and decision making of what to do.
Tell us more about thirdweb’s approach to engineering?
In the past, the flow that I’m used to is that leadership talks to product, and product decides what to work on. Then product meets with design, and engineering sort of figures it out.
At thirdweb, the flow is different. Engineering is what drives decision making. Product comes to engineering to ask what to work on next. Product is more about how this is framed from a Product point of view, but the what is defined by Engineering and by the devs that use our tools. Product is more about the how.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience. How does this impact the work that we do on the engineering team?
It’s really helpful to have varied perspectives and we all learn from each other. Some people come from companies that have a point of view that’s more about build build build. Others come from a place that is less action focused. We have a nice middle ground.
We build fast and maintain quality because people depend on us. We want to move away from the mentality of ‘lets get this perfect and ship in 6 months’. The spectrum of experiences allows us to find a nice balance between quality and speed.
Younger engineers have the opportunity to work with people with a lot of experience which is also really great. Our experienced engineers are super accessible to questions and leverage our #nostupidquestions Slack channel.
Sharing knowledge and collaborating is key. If you ping someone on the team and ask them a question they’ll help you 1:1. There’s no gatekeeping or judgement and it enables us to learn so much faster in a safer space.
How has your experience at a FAANG company affected the way you contribute to the team?
When you’re a small company there aren’t as many processes in place. In a FAANG environment processes tend to slow you down.
When I joined Roblox there were 90 people and when I left there were over 600. So I totally get it when it comes to scaling. We do need a good amount of processes to prevent things from breaking. My experience lets me take more of an intentional approach to the things that we build and how we build it.
Typically in a bigger company onboarding can take up to 2 or 3 months to complete. At a startup we can do this in about a week and makes our engineers way more impactful earlier on.
Also, FAANG environments tend to keep knowledge sharing in public channels to save time and alleviate miscommunication. It inspired us at thirdweb to adopt a similar point of view and prioritize sharing information in public slack channels without feeling too ‘corporate’.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
The main obstacle we face is time. We have a lot to build and not a lot of time to get it done.
We try to mitigate this with prioritization and always lean on the side of ‘let’s put something out there’ even if it’s not perfect yet. We want to get the feedback from our customers first, listen to feedback, and keep improving the product.
Also, the motto of ‘get off local host’ helps us with the challenge of not having a lot of time and wanting to build.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our vision?
I want more people to be building on web3—and to make it easier for them.
I always ask: how can we feed people’s imagination? We want to show them the full power of the SDKs that you can build in. For example: showcase CatAttack and get people inspired about what to build next.
Author: Erika Khanna and Jorge Dalmendray
Contributors: Joher Khan
