My first degree is in economics.  When I graduated there was an appetite for transforming business graduates into engineers, driven by a demand for individuals with both business and technical skills. My career since then has been a mixture of engineering and management roles, both of which I’ve enjoyed. This flexibility and variety have been key in advancing my career and expanding my skills.

One of my first jobs after university was with one of the UK’s then largest communication companies, where I was part of a development team. They provided training in languages like Java, and that’s where my coding journey began. I went on to complete a Masters degree in Information Systems Engineering but I’ve predominantly learned on the job. Since then, I’ve moved between management and development roles, but I’ve always loved the technical aspects of any role.

One of the great things about tech and software engineering is that they are very accessible. A computer science degree is not always necessary. There are so many online resources and remote learning opportunities available. I’ve always loved that ultimately in tech, you’re evaluated on what you can do rather than solely on your degree type or classification. Also working in tech, by default, means a career of lifelong learning. It doesn’t stop when you leave university or college. Languages and frameworks evolve, and new tools become available. I continue to learn every day.

Before Chainalysis, I was working at a company called Currencycloud, which Visa recently acquired. I worked within their Developer Experience team, helping to reduce friction for engineers across the development platform. In 2022, Chainalysis was starting to focus more strongly on the engineer experience and was spinning up a new Developer Productivity team. I was fortunate enough to be approached by the company to be part of that team.

The Developer Productivity team has now transitioned into a wider Platform team. It focuses on creating a stable and usable developer platform to enable engineers to create and deliver new features smoothly, and with as little friction as possible.  

We try to look for and mitigate, pain points in the engineering process at Chainalysis. This could be something as simple as automating a repetitive task or as complex as providing ephemeral infrastructure on demand.  With developer experience in mind, we try to abstract away complexities where we can and minimize the cognitive load on our engineers. This allows engineers to focus on delivering their planned features rather than, for example, having to support their team’s infrastructure or debug their deployment pipeline.

A good developer experience creates a positive engineering environment. It moves us towards more frequent, more reliable, and more secure code deployments. A good developer experience can also contribute towards happier and more productive engineers, with less context switching and minimal blockers to production.

The impact of developer experience initiatives can be assessed qualitatively by seeing changes in how engineers feel about the platform and the experience. We’ve often used tools such as engineering-wide questionnaires and conversations with individual engineers. We also have a DevProd Ambassadors program where each member of my team is buddied with feature teams across engineering. This helps us create long-standing relationships with the feature teams and be aware of the state of their interaction with the platform.  

The impact can also be inferred through feature adoption metrics as well as the use of some well-established quantitative frameworks.  For example, we may be able to see the impact of developer experience initiatives as changes in the DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, Mean Time to Recovery).

For me personally, balancing ad-hoc support requests with planned development is challenging. It requires a constant effort to limit the potential of being sidetracked by issues and focus on long-term improvements whilst still being responsive to engineers.

As a Platform team, we’re looking to build a common set of tools and integrations for Chainalysis engineers.  It’s inefficient and time-consuming to build and maintain a platform catering to every programming language and every stack. Instead, we need to be opinionated and strike the right balance between engineer autonomy and an opinionated platform. Not too opinionated that it alienates engineers and stifles creativity but opinionated enough that it helps make the right thing to do, the easiest thing to do.

I’m enjoying working within engineering at Chainalysis. There are so many great engineers focused on delivering fantastic products for our customers. It’s been great to see how accessible and receptive the Leadership team is to suggestions and input. We’ve grown significantly over the past couple of years but engineering has managed to still retain that responsive and creative start-up feel.