By now, we’ve all heard the phrase “new year, new you,” so what if we shake it up and instead, put a career twist on it? New year, new job.
If you’re one of the many perusing job descriptions right now, you might be inundated with long lists of potential new responsibilities and technologies to learn — but let’s look at the bigger picture and imagine the long-term possibilities. Think of the projects you might see and the new opportunities you might go after along the way.
For engineering development manager Zach Mank, the stand-out opportunity to “take significant ownership over each responsibility that crosses your path” at Honeybee Robotics is one of the best things about his role on the collaborative team. With a variety of literal out-of-this-world projects in the works, Mank noted how participation in these developments grants individuals an invaluable, hands-on chance to learn.
Over at insurance-focused Sure, teams are taking advantage of projects that create opportunities to reflect not only on the progress they’ve made, but also the methods they’re employing that could use fixing. Darren Alfonso, back-end team lead, shared how new products are valuable to both the customer and the engineers developing them. By giving themselves problems to solve, Sure’s engineers get to “implement knowledge, overcome obstacles and continuously improve.”
Whether you want to go as far as the moon to get out of your comfort zone, you are set on finding a way to revive the restaurant industry, or you want to change the landscapes of e-commerce and insurance, the teams at Honeybee Robotics, Restaurant365, Sure, Helium 10 and Thrive Market are working on a range of cool projects that will only benefit from the addition of new tech talent.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
The National Restaurant Association predicts restaurant and food service industry sales totals will jump nearly 20 percent from $659 billion in 2020 to $789 billion this year. While restaurants are seeing customers return, they are now feeling the pressure as hiring remains a challenge.
One of the projects I’m most excited about revolves around helping restaurants attract, hire and retain talent. Specifically, we’re expanding our suite of payroll and human resources solutions to automate the tip-out process, support pay cards and provide earned wage access — all of which help drive differentiation for operators and increase employee satisfaction.
The Covid-19 pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of life, and our ability to support innovation in this area is critical as the industry continues its path toward full recovery.
How will this project help you grow professionally and develop important skills?
My role is ever-evolving as a result of the rapid development of new technology and products. Leadership in general also requires a continuous learning and iteration process. I’m lucky to work with team members and customers who challenge my assumptions and encourage me to think deeper about the impact technology can make on a restaurant’s operation and its employees and customers.
Beyond this, as we’ve built our payroll and HR solutions, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of what it takes to create connected experiences across the employee lifecycle on my own team. It’s an end-to-end experience from their first days as an applicant to their last paycheck and every day in between.
Restaurants will finally be able to provide differentiation in employee benefits, which supports team growth and hiring.”
What impact will this project have on both your business and customers?
In today’s market, successful restaurants must do more than offer good food at a reasonable price — they need to deliver a unique customer experience. But differentiation is not easy, and it requires a restaurant to execute on all aspects of the experience: a fine-tuned menu, high-quality ingredients, a memorable atmosphere, and the right employees and managers to tie it all together.
This project offers a unique opportunity to support restaurants with technology to create engaged employees who are at the heart of providing positive restaurant experiences. Behind the technology, however, the benefits and experience provided to employees are just as important.
Restaurants will finally be able to provide differentiation in employee benefits, which supports team growth and hiring. This is even more important today as they are competing with companies outside the industry for available workers. Beyond this, differentiated processes and opportunities that put the employee first will support team member retention and, more importantly, quality of life.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
It will be a year of expansion for Sure. Our engineering team is in the process of configuring several innovative insurance offerings with our partners in the consumer and e-commerce space that will launch in 2022. We’re also expanding our existing insurance offerings to new regions.
These new and enhanced products give the engineering team new problems to solve. This makes every day interesting and gives us the opportunity to implement knowledge, overcome obstacles and continuously improve.
From a technical standpoint, I’m excited to try out new features in Python 3.10+, such as union types and structural pattern matching. If there’s significant progress on nogil, it would be cool to test that out too.
How do new projects help you grow professionally and develop important skills?
Every project gives us the opportunity to reflect on our progress. For example, our team might note something like, “When we built something similar before, we did X, Y and Z. X worked really well. Y worked, but could use improvement. And let’s never do Z again. Instead, let’s try W.” Continuous inspection and improvement makes us all better engineers.
Continuous inspection and improvement makes us all better engineers.”
What impact will this project have on both your business and customers?
From a high level, insurance helps give people peace of mind. As time goes on, insurance customers’ needs evolve, creating the demand for new insurance products. Two hundred years ago, no one had auto insurance. Twenty years ago, no one had smartphone insurance. You get the idea. Launching and expanding innovative insurance products and making them easy to understand, configure and purchase enables our client carriers and brands to offer people an easier path to protect what matters most to them.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
It’s so hard to choose a single favorite. Right now we’ve got seven flight programs on the books, all at various stages of development, including an end-to-end sampling system for an octocopter going to Saturn’s moon, Titan; a pneumatic sampler for a Japanese Space Agency spacecraft that will return a sample from Mars’ moon, Phobos, to Earth within this decade; and a one-meter-long drill going to investigate how much water-ice is near the surface of permanently-shadowed craters at the moon’s poles.
If I had to pick, though, that last project excites me the most because it will be the key that unlocks an entirely new paradigm within the space industry — in situ resource utilization. The data that Honeybee’s TRIDENT Drill collects at the lunar poles will shape future missions to collect and actually use the water we find there — whether as a consumable for agriculture or astronauts, or in the form of hydrogens and oxygens that power fuel cells or rocket engines. Even more exciting, we actually will get two bites at the apple since the drill is featured on both NASA’s PRIME-1 mission in 2022 and VIPER rover in 2023. Next year will be a busy one!
Our most valuable resource isn’t intellectual property; it’s people.”
How will this project help you and your teammates grow professionally?
One of the best parts of working at Honeybee is the opportunity to take significant ownership over each responsibility that crosses your path — and it’s made even better by being able to do so surrounded by a world-class team. The work that we are currently doing on the TRIDENT Drill is no exception: It’s a sophisticated multi-actuator robotic system controlled by fully-custom flight software and avionics, and because each engineering discipline only has a handful of people as part of the core team, each individual is indispensable.
Honeybee also encourages everyone to be involved in the project from end to end. For example, the same engineers who designed parts originally are the ones who get to put them together in the clean room, and they’ll even be the ones to actually operate the drill on the moon. The resulting depth and breadth of exposure along the way is huge for individual development — being asked to solve problems no one has ever solved before is a great way to build experience that no one else has — but there’s also a strong culture of collaboration and mentorship to back you up in case you ever need guidance from someone more experienced.
What impact will this project have on both your business and customers?
When TRIDENT makes its way to the launchpad, it will not only represent the most complex flight system that we have ever delivered out of our California office across all engineering disciplines, but it will also be the start of Honeybee’s next phase of growth. The lessons that we learned in the process, and the skills that our employees built along the way, will help support the success of our other concurrent flight developments. These lessons and skills will also become the foundation we build upon for a more complicated end-to-end sampling system that will go to Titan on a mission called Dragonfly in the years to come.
Just about everything that our California office works on is bespoke engineering — that is, nothing for production, just one-offs — so our most valuable resource isn’t intellectual property; it’s people. Skill-building in this way is really a long-term investment for both the individual and the company. And that’s on top of how exciting TRIDENT will be for the entire industry once it gets off the launchpad and lands at Shackleton Crater to start collecting the data that will shape the next decade or two of exploration missions!
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
We are constantly exploring new ways to serve different types of customers. One customer that we plan to improve our offerings for is our mid-market and enterprise-level user. Particularly, we want to give these customers a better picture of their market and performance against their competitors, and find ways we can connect the dots for our users to remove the cognitive burden of having to know what needs to be done based on the picture we provide them with. This is an exciting opportunity for Helium 10 to attempt to both grow — and grow with — our customers’ businesses.
How will this project help you grow professionally and develop important skills?
It’s really cool for me to think about a different cohort of customers. Many of the projects I’ve worked on in the past have focused on a large audience with an emphasis on scalability. When we look at more up-market customers, we have the freedom to think about trying things that don’t scale and narrow that focus on simply delivering the highest value possible for a potentially smaller group of customers.
We have the freedom to think about trying things that don’t scale and narrow that focus on simply delivering the highest value possible.”
What impact will this project have on both your business and customers?
Delivering market data insights to our customers will help them understand how they can better grow their businesses, identify new opportunities and streamline the actions they can take to positively impact their businesses. The hope is that any business using our solutions will find tangible value — preferably in the form of an overall increase in revenue — while simultaneously making their businesses easier to run successfully. We want to put more dollars in their pockets without adding additional work. Helium 10 benefits as well in that we will grow with our customers by improving our offers in ways that we can monetize, leaving everyone satisfied.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
The most exciting project on our platform engineering team’s roadmap is the migration to service mesh-based microservices architecture on Kubernetes. Service mesh is the next evolutionary step of the service-oriented architecture, heavily driven by tech companies that have to scale their systems in order to meet the needs of a fast-growing business.
Thrive Market has written microservices for a number of years, but the decision to move to service mesh could be a game changer as we are rapidly growing past one million subscribers. We have microservices that are implemented in Java, Go and Python; all of them duplicate some of the boilerplate functionality, like network functions. Service mesh will allow us to abstract out common functionality such as remote call retries, service discovery, circuit breaking, security and observability from each service, and will allow us to utilize battle-tested open-source solutions that use Envoy proxy and leverage sidecar pattern. We are eager to roll this out in 2022, as it will go a long way in simplifying and standardizing our back-end services to make them more robust and maintainable. This is essential on the journey to support our growing member base.
This service mesh project will reduce the time-to-market for new features, which is critical in the e-commerce space.”
How will this project help your team grow professionally and develop important skills?
These projects will help our team tremendously to grow personally and professionally. Firstly, this initiative follows current best industry standards for application development and infrastructure setup. Deploying services on service mesh on top of Kubernetes allows us to utilize a modern tech stack and the latest tools with a huge wave of adoption and continued feature development.
Secondly, we are able to avoid a lock-in in terms of choosing a programming language by shifting a large amount of complexity from application developers to frameworks and tools that come with them. This will allow engineers to really pick the best programming language for each task without having to worry about the data and control plane concerns.
Finally, this transition will encourage our development team to think about system development in distributed architecture terms, as opposed to tightly coupled monolithic applications. Distributing functionality into smaller, simpler, more manageable and maintainable services will ultimately improve quality, reduce customer impediments and bugs, and increase development velocity.
What impact will this project have on both your business and customers?
This service mesh project will reduce the time-to-market for new features, which is critical in the e-commerce space. We will be building a reusable and well-tested foundation that will enable quicker rollout of scalable and maintainable single-purpose services, and in turn, will be significantly easier to develop, test and scale.
It will also simplify development and testing of each individual service by removing the necessity to learn, integrate and support similar libraries across different language stacks. Common functions will be handled by the service mesh control plane, and instead of reinventing the wheel in each service, the teams’ time will be freed up to focus on business functionality.
This project will help reduce risks associated with releases. Traditionally, as an enterprise grows in size, the importance of system stability increases compared to the speed of new feature delivery. That is a compromise that many companies have to make, but with the service mesh approach, there is really no need to compromise speed vs. stability. Instead, we leverage third party components to mitigate risks by enabling modern strategies such as canary and blue-green deployments.
