Katie Peters could use a lawyer as she began her technology career.
In her first year at the University of British Columbia, Peters’ computer science classes were divided almost evenly by gender. But most of her classmates soon changed majors, and until last year, Peters usually had only two or three women in those classes. She felt increasingly isolated and uncomfortable asking for help.
After graduating with a degree in computer science in 2012, Peters took a job as a software developer for TELUS, a Canadian telecommunications company. Joining an organization with more than 90,000 employees, Peters initially found it challenging to pave the way for its procedures and structure. So when the position of personal developer in TELUS ‘new engineering performance team opened last fall, Peters took the opportunity.
“I wanted to be the person I wanted to help,” said Peters, who began the role last October. “In a big company like TELUS, there are so many complex processes and it’s really hard to navigate. After all, you feel stupid for a long time and you have to ask a lot of questions. I don’t want other people to experience this. I want to do better. ”
Peters is a “brilliant developer and brilliant technologist,” said Justin Watts, head of TELUS ‘engineering performance team.
Peters is now helping lead an initiative to change TELUS ‘culture to give better opportunities to its developers. Much of this effort is aimed at promoting the widespread adoption of Microsoft’s GitHub hosting platform to help automate TELUS software development and facilitate collaboration with some of the company’s 4,000 developers. TELUS recently made GitHub available throughout the company and signed an agreement with Microsoft to help manage the use of the platform at the enterprise level and provide GitHub training to developers.
Justin Watts, head of TELUS’s development department, says Peters ‘experience as a developer and former member of TELUS’ corporate architecture team makes it ideal to help redefine the company’s approach to software development.
“It’s all guided by Katie and the vision she has,” said Watts, who leads the engineering performance team. “Katie is great at capturing this relationship with the developer and what our goals are. She is a brilliant developer and a brilliant technologist.
“She is seen as a truly high, influential mind in the company.”
Justin Watts.
Peters is already shaking things up. Inspired by The Unicorn Project, Jean Kim’s 2019 novel about a group of apostate developers seeking to bring down the existing order and make the work more complete, Peters replaced the usual robust presentation tests with rotating ones. pink and purple tones and animated unicorns and adopted the book’s mantra to provide “focus, flow and joy” to developers.
Transform recently spoke with Peters on Microsoft Teams from her home in Vancouver, where she lives with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. The interview is abbreviated for clarity and length.
TRANSFORM: Why was the engineering performance team formed and what is its mission?
PETERS: We’ve been moving to the cloud for some time, but it’s a challenge. This greatly simplifies very complex operational activities and turns these things into code. So instead of needing an operations specialist to manually create a custom server for the developer to host their application, the definition of that server is standardized and codified in a way that can be stored and managed along with the application code .
This makes it easier for the developer to manage it himself, but they are now expected to have this definition of a server, where they have never before had exposure to the operational side of software development. This is a really difficult transition for people. And many inherited processes have not yet caught up with cloud development. We give developers a lot more freedom, but it’s also a lot more responsible in different areas than they may not have had experience before. So we need to make sure that this is not a burden for them.
Our team exists to help developers make this transition in the cloud and update all of this legacy process baggage to align with the new cloud paradigm.
TRANSFORM: Why did TELUS see the need to change the way software development is done?
PETERS: We need to stay innovative and creative. We need to be able to react quickly to the market, and if we want to be able to do that, we need to give developers time, space and safety to do so, while making sure that what they build is secure and reliable.
TELUS headquarters in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia.
To allow us to move fast without sacrificing security and reliability, we really need to make this developer live our focus. I treat this because developers are my clients and what experiences I can give them to inspire them to keep insisting and keep innovating and just unblock them as much as I can to make it as simple and fast as possible. that they can continue to innovate.
TRANSFORMATION: What role can GitHub play in helping developers move to this new cloud paradigm?
PETERS: GitHub was just for storing source code, but now it has many other features. When writing code, for example, you need to be able to plan this work and distribute it to people. For this we can use GitHub projects.
Once you’ve developed the code, there are tools you can use to tell you if there’s a problem with the way you wrote it. In the past, we would have waited until we tried to release this code to our customers before running these tests. So when things went wrong, it was really expensive. Developers can now return their code to GitHub’s public repository for the rest of the team to see. We can then run all of these automated security tests and scans, so it’s easier to make adjustments just then, while in the old world there were potentially months later they would get this feedback.
With GitHub taking over this developer lifecycle, this allows us to build a lot of automation so we have end-to-end visibility of where developers spend their time and what they do. This is good for indicators of how we can improve this experience and make it better for people.
TRANSFORMATION: GitHub is ultimately a tool. What other components do you think are in charge of managing this cultural change in TELUS?
PETERS: As a large company, TELUS can be a bit formal. It is difficult for people to ask for help. We really wanted to change this culture. We wanted to be open and accessible and allow people to come out to a psychologically safe place to share their problems. In this way we can understand all the little things that contribute to so much work.
Peters was inspired by The Unicorn Project, a novel about a group of apostate developers.
We have a lot of really creative people at TELUS, a lot of talented developers, and they come up with really interesting ways to deal with the status quo that don’t really solve the problem for anyone else – it’s just a workaround that they developed. We need people to feel safe to come to us with their problems and to believe that we can help them solve them so that we can then bring this to everyone and encourage this improvement everywhere.
TRANSFORM: How did your interest in computers start?
PETERS: My parents really wanted me to be interested in computers, so they bought me their own computer when I was a kid. They took me to robotics camps and software development camps and all sorts of things.
I started playing video games when I was 4 years old. I played Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon and Fatty Bear’s Birthday Surprise. I loved all kinds of video games. Morrowind was another great game for me. They had a moderating community, and I learned a lot about computers in general by participating in that community. (Modification refers to the practice of changing content or creating new content for video games.)
I wanted to work in the video game industry, but when I applied for cooperative work during university, I came across Sierra Wireless (a Canadian IoT solution provider). Since I was exposed to this industry, I liked the consistency and stability of the telecom industry and the feeling that you are contributing to something important. Providing the Internet to people is really important.
TRANSFORM: You said that sometimes you feel like you have an impostor syndrome. Did you feel so special as a female developer?
PETERS: I’ve always had a lot of impostor syndrome, which I think is true for a lot of software developers. I’m not unique that way. I think it’s worse as a woman, but I think it’s common in software development to feel that way. The industry is somehow immersed in this mythology of such really smart maniacs who live and breathe computer science and create Google or Microsoft in their basement, and they are all geniuses and always know everything about everything.
TELUS, which employs about 4,000 developers, is using GitHub to transform its approach to software development.
There are really high expectations in the software industry in general and I think everyone is experiencing this, but I think it is reinforced for a woman. Because the expectations, I think, at least when I started in the industry, were that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m a poseur and I just took my place because I’m a woman. So I had to work really hard to look very smart.
TRANSFORM: Is it important for you, as a woman in this role, to attract more women developers in the field?
PETERS: Absolutely. When you are the only woman, this can be a real challenge. And when you have one or two women in a large group, sometimes you can be forced …
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