Meet Josh 👋 he joined the tiney team as a Software Engineer about 10 months ago after graduating from Makers Academy, a coding bootcamp. Let's hear how he's finding tiney and learn more about his background!
Why did you move into software engineering?
I started my career in Digital Marketing and there were parts of my role that I found a bit tedious and boring. I discovered that some of it could be automated by writing scripts, so I just started teaching myself how to code after work. Turned out that I enjoyed coding and automating stuff more than the actual marketing, so I joined a coding bootcamp for a four-month intensive course. This was a brilliant experience and I got to work on loads of different projects. I graduated from the Bootcamp into the start of the COVID lockdowns, so one I particularly enjoyed building was a COVID data tracker - https://covid-19-data-viz.netlify.app/.
Why did you join tiney?
I knew I wanted to work for a startup because I love the scrappiness and being able to contribute to different parts of the business and not just be boxed in. I've also always had a passion for education. My degree was in Psychology with a focus on Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, so tiney's mission really resonated because I understood the importance of a strong early years education. When I went through my interview process with tiney, I was impressed that everyone I met was smart, caring and super aligned behind the mission.
What are you most proud of during your time at tiney?
Can I have two? I'm super proud of helping to build the tiney register. This was my first React Native endeavour and it's a feature that's used each and every day by our childminders. It allows our childminders to check their children in and out. Through the register, our childminders can have an audit of attendance in the app, parents know when their children are checked in, and tiney can use the data to generate invoices.
Another highlight was being involved in an internal project to increase the amount of feedback everyone receives at tiney. I built a SlackBot that notifies individuals & their managers to book in regular feedback conversations. This is based on their individual start dates and specifies what feedback milestone the person has reached. Everyone now has their probation review, a 3-3-3 (three things going well, three things to think about, every three months) and an annual pause.
In your opinion what kind of engineers thrive at tiney and why?
People who are curious. In my opinion, this is such an important trait for engineers to have at tiney. It's one of our values too 😉 We are a small team and don't have set domain experts so you find yourself jumping around different parts of the stack. Being super curious helps you keep up with the ever-changing challenges. We're also all product-minded engineers because we're so close to the customers' needs. In that regard, being curious helps us empathise and build more useful features.
What's the hardest thing about working at tiney?
Having so much that we could build and not enough time! We have a long backlog and need to constantly prioritise our work. That's why we're hiring - come and join us!
What's the best thing about working at tiney?
The diversity and range of experiences in the company. Often times tech companies employ people with pretty homogenous backgrounds, so it's great that we have people who've had such different experiences in life. Not only does it make the water cooler chat a little more interesting 😛 but when you come up against a problem you get so many different opinions and suggestions. It's awesome.
3 words describe working at tiney?
💡 Interesting
💥 Impactful
🙃 Fun
