Jay Taylor's notes

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2013-10-29 Value Stories

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Clipped on: 2013-10-29
managerial skill
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I was responsible for a quiet and introverted junior engineer who was fresh out of college.  I saw leadership potential in him and fostered it by gently coaxing him out of his comfort zone into accepting more and more responsibility.  With my mentorship his communication skills and self-confidence improved markedly, and he developed a high degree of autonomy and grew to be adept at organizing, planning, and developing entire features on his own.

engineering talent
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SendHub wanted their underlying PostgreSQL datastore to be horizontally scalable, so in only 8 weeks I single-handedly implemented a sharding scheme and ported their existing application and all it’s features to be compatible with it.  This included a system which automatically transforms regular SQL into distributed queries that run across the entire database cluster.

problem solving
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The SendHub engineering and  team wanted better unit testing throughout the 

getting people to get along
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I had an engineering manager who had a tendency to micro-manage his reports.

going the extra mile
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