Emilien Macchi is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He’s been a contributor to OpenStack since almost its inception as an open-source project.
I had the pleasure of having Emilien on Le Podcast to discuss how learning and sharing were essential ways of growing his career in Software Engineering.
We covered many topics including; peer reviews, pair programming, remote work, and I also asked what he thinks are the most important things to develop as a coder—spoiler alert, it is not just technical skills.
As Emilien is also one of the first people who left a review of our book on Goodreads, I asked him what he thought about the book and how it has helped him. Here’s what he had to say.
Right before reading the book, I was, and still am, working on a refreshed Vision and Mission statement for my team. It has been a long time since we last reflected on this and we wanted to understand who we are now, who we want to be, and what we want to achieve in the future. This is a strategic team effort; which requires patience and team interactions.
At the same time, on the technical side, I’ve been working on the simplification roadmap for our product, OpenStack TripleO, where there is a long-term goal to make management of OpenStack clouds simpler and more consistent across the Red Hat portfolio. It involves a cross-team effort, and very often the biggest challenge isn’t technical but a human one.
So I was looking for a book which would “refresh” things I’ve learned before but in a new way. I was eager to read I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge to learn some new concepts, update my knowledge, and find some inspiration for these challenges.
I’ve known Alexis for a while and I read his first book, Changing Your Team From the Inside, which I really liked and shared with people around me. So for me, it was a natural step to read this new book as I was sure this book would give me the inspiration I was looking for.
I read the book two times.
The first time was just a quick read through as I found that the first part, the story, very intriguing and difficult to put down.
On the second read I tried all the experiments. It was difficult not to rush through this part, as it required more work from me, but when I remembered to be patient I was delighted to realize that the second part was in fact what I was waiting for from the book.
Doing the work for myself gave me access to insights that answered a lot of my questions and gave me new ideas to implement in the work I was currently doing.
It wasn’t all easy going. Some experiments that I tried are still difficult for me in the real world. For example retrospectives. I have a hard time to stimulate the other team members so we can have productive retrospectives. The book gives concrete steps on how to do it with a list of actions but the “do it” is in my opinion the real challenge. The provided links are useful so I just need to spend more time rethinking how we can make people more involved in that exercise.
When I finished the book, I felt that I got another great tool in my library; which I’ll certainly share and re-use for my personal career. The fact that the book is easily written and not that long made me think I could re-read some chapters while experimenting on some exercises again with my team.
I’m very happy to have the book on my desk as something I can reopen from time to time to remind myself about something I learnt before when I need another “refresh”.
The next step is to share this book with my peers. Having this knowledge has helped me, but we could have an even bigger impact if they can also learn some of the described techniques and we start using them within the team when we work together.
Thanks so much Emilien for sharing your story with the book and how it has helped you.
You can learn more about Emilien on his blog: my1.fr/blog
And you can follow him on Twitter at: @EmilienMacchi