“Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them, I shall build my castle.” 🏗️

My name is Vlad, I'm improving my knowledge in a new stack, learning about the tools for success and more importantly learning how to share growth opportunities with the people around me. I love a lot of the generic things techies are really into nowadays like ultimate frisbee, bouldering and video games. I do at least pride myself in steering clear of first-person shooters and enjoying action adventure games like The Arkham Trilogy and The Last of Us as well as strategy games like Civ 6.

Currently working in my first full time role as a Development Manager at Harled Inc. and gaining knowledge in Ruby on Rails 💎, MVC best practices, frontend Javascript and Agile methodologies in Azure. As part of the team I'm leading development an application we're using to provide SaaS to the RCAF, one PR at a time. My responsibilities in my development manager role involve tailoring work item definitions during our Agile sprint process and empowering our developers to consistently provide mission-driven value to our client. With my time at Harled I have learned about the many advantages of being a part of a boutique development field; the improved speed, sense of craftsmanship and niche focus creation with the latest technologies.

I work well with anyone that is approachable and values keeping open lines of communication while on the job. Pair programming is something that I've used very often and I've found that the best work gets done with workmates that keep positive attitudes on the hardest of tasks and inherently take critism just as positively! It’s important to me that my co-workers value learning as much as I do. To this point, I work well with team members that challenge me to fully understand a suggestion that is given to me on how to improve or fix an issue. I expect the same attitude from my peers and enjoy working with a team that is motivated to refine their skills and open to my guidance when building a solution.

An important part of my processes when getting work done is that most of my thinking is best done when I can focus on a task uninterrupted for a longer period of time. It’s important that I have enough of a buffer when starting, or refocusing, on a task because I need a period of build up to get in my “coding zone”. Because of this, I find back-to-back or closely timed meetings to be very exhaustive. The smaller the times between meetings I have during a day, the less time I have to get fully immersed in the work I have to do. Conversely, having sessions where I can improve my organizational or development knowledge with group research on different topics weekly, an exercise Harled does really well, is something that energises me to add more quality to my work.

My approach to problem-solving is focused on getting an idea of the full spread an issue can consist of in the codebase. It’s one thing to understand what file changes will fix said issue, it’s another thing entirely to understand what other areas of the code these changes could affect. This fix could involve refactors that should prompt updates in similar files or might make other endpoints too verbose where a second look might be needed. I like to start my development processes on the outside and work my way in.

My recent shift to a development manager role involves handling many intricacies related to defining work items and effort levels within an Agile framework. I've learned a lot and have come to realize that strong estimation isn't solely about story points - it involves a deep understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the team, enabling precise task assignments and fostering growth opportunities. When defining and managing performance metrics for a small team, it's important to iterate towards highly specific metrics that may not necessarily fit a typical large company's framework, but ultimately enable effective targeted improvement plans for quick results.

• InMail me on LinkedIn
• Send me a message at vladg.hociota@gmail.com