Funnel
I started at Funnel in September 2021 after working as a gardener for a season (around six months).
Coming out of a depression made me a little hesitant to seek a new programming job, but a friend of mine who worked at Funnel told me to apply and promised that the company was 'different'. He told me about how they employed something called 'mob programming' and it seemed like something that would fit me really well. In the end, I trusted my friend and applied.
Now three years and some change later I have to leave due to moving to Finland. But in my time at Funnel, I have learned a lot about programming and myself.
Technical growth
Funnel is a SaaS company that provides marketers and advertisers with tools to increase their efficiency and help them analyze their different advertising campaigns.
I worked within the data platform which allows the customers to automatically download data from all of their different marketing platforms (google ads, facebook, tiktok etc.) and convert that data to a homogenous dataset.
I worked in the team that maintains the Google Ads connector for most of my time at Funnel, but the last six months or so I changed to the Meta-team (facebook, insta, threads) to reinforce that team which was struggling a bit.
These connectors are written in Python, which is then executed on our internal data platform written in Rust. The platform itself is then run on AWS ECS. The Google Ads connector has about 150,000 'sources' (different connections) that download their data around once per hour. There is a huge amount of data flowing through our system (10 TB daily last I checked).
Maintaining a connector means fixing bugs, data mismatches (data in our app doesn't match external platform like Google Ads), building new features, etc. It's a lot of different type of work which I enjoy. I prefer developing new stuff as most everyone else, but troubleshooting bugs really helps to understand a new system.
Some of the technologies I've used at Funnel include:
- Python
- Dataframes (pandas/polars)
- AWS (ECS, SNS and SQS, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, ...)
- Rust (a little)
- Typescript and Javascript
- Flask, FastAPI, Sanic
- Tailwind
Outside of my daily work, I also sat in Funnel's security group and headed up the internal tooling group for all of the connector teams.
In the security group, we talk about security issues for the company as a whole and make sure every team is compliant with our security certificates (like SOC 2).
The tooling group built and maintained tools to help both ourselves and other parts of the organization interact with our part of the app. We built a few service-to-service tools, a few large scripts to allow us to query customers' data, and a few web apps to allow our support team to run connectors with different configs without needing AWS accounts or coding knowledge.
Personal growth
As I mentioned I was working as a gardener before starting here. I worked there due to entering a depression after my previous job where I 'hit the wall'.
Having that experience and then working at Funnel taught me that I really value a work environment where people are encouraged to be open and take care of themselves.
I value my health and well-being more than I value a little monetary gain. Humans deserve a workplace where they are valued and feel like it's OK to 'just be', even if they are not 'feeling 100%' all the time.
Working so close together, mob programming, almost every day really lets you know how to act and behave while in a team. It can be stressful and disagreements will arise and if you don't have a solid foundation to build on it can lead to bigger conflicts. I'm happy that me and my team, with the help from bosses, laid out clear expectations and signed a team agreement and a 'ways of working' document when I started.
Our guiding principle was "assume good intent". For example if someone asks "why did you do it like this", you should "assume good intent" which means they either want to learn or understand and not that they're questioning you or your ability.
Openness and communication are paramount in fostering a workplace where people thrive in the long run, through thick and thin, and highs and lows. If you are feeling down that is fine, but if you give a little heads up by saying "Hey team, I'm not feeling that great today", that can save someone from thinking "Why was X so short with me today" which can lead to further conflict.
In the same spirit, just because someone was short with you, or you found someone to be rude, you shouldn't jump to conclusions. They might be going through something or just having a bad day.
Zensum
I joined Zensum after their CTO who was a friend from university approached me about a role there.
While I technically left Zensum in 2020, I only worked there for less than a year due to entering a depression.
Technical growth
I didn't have time to learn a lot here, but I credit Zensum with me first working with microservices. Our backend was distributed across multiple Kotlin modules where each module was responsible for talking to a certain bank.
My first task here was integrating Bank ID and creating a new integration to a bank. In this project I had my first chance to use Redis (I had consumed from it before) in a more complete way.
Some technologies we used here include:
- Kotlin
- PHP
- Redis
Personal growth
Even though it ended with me entering a depression, I still learned a lot about myself from this job.
I appreciated working in a team where everyone knew eachother from before (we all went to university together), but it also caused me to ignore some signals that I was heading in to a bad place.
Workshop / TA @ Sthlm University
After I finished my first programming course (Java) at university, the teacher asked the top performers if we could help him by assisting students during the course's regular "help sessions". Basically a few hours long block where students could sign up on a list to get help with programming questions.
During this time, I was also approached by a student who was in charge of the student-run "help workshop", which was a similar set-up: one day every week, the students in the workshop were available to assist other students with any questions they had regarding any of their courses.
Technical Growth
While it didn't teach me any new hard programming techniques, it did teach me that trying to teach others really requires you to understand the thing you're trying to teach.
Having to articulate concepts to people who hadn't programmed before showed me where my own understanding was lacking, which allowed me to deepen my knowledge. All of the "uhh because that's just what you do" I had were exposed and I could deepen my own understanding of different concepts, beyond just being able to use them while programming.
Personal Growth
I grew a lot from this position. It made me more open and kind, more patient. Just a lot of personal growth that I am still thankful for to this day. I really like the person I am today and I credit a lot of that to my time at Sthlms University, and a sizeable chunk of that from the experiences I had while teaching other students.
One of the most important things I gained from this position was the realisation that I like to teach others. It provides great satisfaction when you see a concept "click" in someones head. In addition to that, as I mentioned previously, explaining something to another person really forces you to understand it, beyond "I know how to use this thing".