eso. The primary way that most people get into this industry is through traditional computer science path. Going to college, getting the degree on, then finding a job in the industry. I took a little bit of a different path. I was first introduced to computer science through video games, and when I was younger, we would spend a lot of time playing online video games and finding ways Thio hack or modify those games. This was my first introduction to programming as a whole, which spurred interest in various other directions that computer science could go. Um, and there's a part of that, uh, some friends and I who had on been, you know, coding together for quite some time. This had to start a company called Tiny Chat. Um, Tiny chat was a video chat application that allowed multiple users to essentially like facetime before facetime. Um, and that sort of gave us a A crash course and had a scale in application. We got pretty popular, got some funding from some investors in Silicon Valley. Andi then went from there. Since then, I've held various other roles in engineering management, primarily in, um, the social media space It was a cto a tumbler. For a few years. Prior to that, I held just about every other engineering role that tumbler. I worked in the MedTech space for a couple of years building a secure video conferencing applications for medical use. Um, and now I am the senior vice president of engineering Envision software.

sure. Eso I'd say the primary things that I really worked facilitate is health of the engineering organization. When I say health, I mean things like developer happiness. Our churn rate, which is the rate at which people are leaving the company, are hiring. Rate is the rate at which people are entering the company, um, partnerships with the product management organization. So making sure that the engineering team is working to execute the priorities that have been laid out by the product management and leadership organizations onda working Thio ensure that we're keeping to sort of the fundamental things that keep a business running. So keeping our timelines and check making sure estimates air good, making sure that we're innovating where necessary. Evaluating our tech debt, um, introducing new technologies where they make sense and getting rid of legacy technologies where they make sense. A lot of those things are group efforts. They're not things that I can do myself. I need a team of good, highly skilled people around me to help, Um, but I would say that my role is mostly in guiding which types of those things we work on in what order to ensure the health and stability of the businesssure. Uh, top three priorities. I'd say our health of the engineering team as a whole were nothing without our people. So, um, even though we are a technology organization in this industry is an industry made up of people and individuals on Do you need to make sure that those people have everything that they need to be able to do their jobs? That is what I would say is Number one Number two, I would say, is making sure that the engineering team is in mind with the overall business priorities. So making sure that we're contributing in a holistic way to the bottom line of the business on Number three, I would say is hiring hiring is hard. You have to do hiring constantly. It's a job that never ends. Um, in in this industry, you're going tohave generally a meantime, between two and five years that people move onto their next role, and that's just the way it ISS. So you need to make sure you have a constant fresh pipeline of new people looking to join your organization because people are going to leave and that's okay. People need to leave to grow. People need to leave if they want to try something new. A different experience. Onda hiring has to be among your top priorities. Azan, engineering leader in this space. Faras work hours ago. Um, it can vary, I think, given that we are a global company and have people in many countries and different time zones across the world, I don't really have a traditional sort of 9 to 5 role. Uh, sometimes something might pop up in the later hours and I might need to take care of, but then sometimes we could be quiet, and I might really have a lot of time to myself to really get my head down and work on things throughout the day. But I spend most of my day jumping from meeting to meeting, uh, trying thio, help mediate and figure out where the most useful on sometimes that can be early in the day. Sometimes that could be late in the day. It really depends on the day

I would say major challenges. Um, a lot of people think that technology is the hard thing when working in the technology industry, but it's actually not The hard thing is people and understanding people in general. Um, I have 160 employees. That's 160 sets of dreams, aspirations, 160 sets of problems, 160 sets of, you know, people who might have different personalities that might not blend well together. So I think mediating and managing those personalities and relationships and organizing them into such a way that they could be effective from a contribution standpoint eyes one of the hardest challenges in engineering on. But you know, that's hard challenge in business as a whole, right? I don't think that's unique to the engineering organization, but I do think that given that there are so many different ways to do things in engineering, there is no one correct way. When you have a lot of highly talented, highly skilled people working in an organization, you find that you have a lot of different opinions on what is the correct way to do something. Eso mediating those disputes and mediating those those types of things that might pop up is a huge part of what the challenges. Because if you choose the wrong thing, then you could go far off in the wrong path and have ah problem when it comes Thio, you know, maintaining that technology long term, um, assed faras specific examples, I'd say, you know, classic. One can come down to choosing the right programming language for a specific project. Um, sometimes there are multiple languages that will fit the bill for what you're trying to do. A t. End of the day. You have to pick something that is going to be useful in solving the problem. But maybe you also want something that's more widely known, something that is easier for your engineers to ramp up on, even though it might be a language that doesn't do things as good as some of the other choice is, there might be a net loss if you choose it in terms of productivity of the overall team, so choosing something that might not just be technically superior but might be superior in terms of getting people trained on it. Getting it, uh, accepted within the organization might be the better choice. I think that's probably one of the classic examples that I could give