About O'Reilly and what they do
O'Reilly Media is an online learning platform. And we give users access to technical content through many products that make up the features on the platform. So I want to say features, I mean, live events, you know, industry experts get to host live events about specific topics, users can attend those events. So that's a team that I work on. And I'm a software engineer on that team.
Details on O'Reilly's engineering team
Yeah, so I would say that when it comes to the engineering team, like, say you were to join a team, you'd be working with a handful of engineers, a few of them will be back-end engineers, and front-end, depending upon the product that you're focusing on. You also get to work closely with the engineering director, a product manager, project manager, designer, and perhaps a quality assurance engineer, that person that you'd be passing off your work to, to review before it gets out to production. So very cross functional, a lot of collaboration and communication with people in different roles. And that's also part of what makes it super exciting. And it gives you opportunity to also to not just code but also to be part of planning processes, breaking down the work that you're going to be doing your team.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
One of the most interesting and long-term projects that my team worked on as a part of this larger initiative to move from a monolithic architecture to microservices. So the big question was like, how do you transition from the platform, insisting on one huge service to a collection of smaller granular services in a smart way, and in a safe way that won't disrupt functionality or any experiences that users have? So that was pretty challenging work? Because we were tackling so many different things at once. We're thinking about the decisions on the types of backend services, front end middleware to create their specific purposes that they needed to serve. And how do we build something new while managing old architecture that was still alive in production, and properly retired parts of that old codebase. And once the new services were launched in, we're replacing the old code. And then the other part of that, which is super interesting is the user interface improvements that we now have the opportunity to make, because we were spinning up totally new services, and how can we propel the overall branding of the platform forward. So a lot of different moving parts. And it was super interesting to tackle that. And it's one of my favorite things that we worked on.
Details on the tech stack
Our tech stack means a lot of React JavaScript, Redux for database, I'm sorry, for data fetching and querying with Graph QL, as well. There's also Django Python and Postgres SQL for back-end development and database things. So we've been pretty open recently, I would say to new and different technologies out there beyond that conditional stack that we have. And we're also encouraging the meeting during in our work weeks as well, where we're exploring the use of like other tools, and also sharing that information and engineering wide, and sharing our findings that could potentially be valuable and insightful for other engineers.
What to expect during the interview process
Yeah, so we have a couple stages, there's an introductory call, just getting to know you and like, who you are, what you're all about and what your background is. And then also, we like to have this technical portion where you actually get to take home a project and work through that for a certain amount of time, and then give it back. And then what happens is you get on a call with other engineers, you and we kind of run through the code, maybe we run it and see what it looks like and ask a few questions about what you liked focusing on what you wish that you had more time to work on. If you if given that time. And you know, just go through some technical questions about why you wrote the code that you did. The very conversational, I would say I'm more so meant to reflect how you would be collaborating with other engineers, if you are, if you have code reviews, and other engineers are building code before it gets out to production.
About O'Reilly's culture
I would say first of all, I love working on building out an online learning platform. I think that self education and learning is a huge thing to me. It's super important. What I also like is that under the hood The actual, the actual principle persists in the culture itself. So we have a learning culture. That's what that means. And we're always committed to growing and learning from each other and from the content that's made available on the platform, which is great. So engineers are very willing to collaborate with you, and answer any questions that you might have about code implementation strategy, solving bugs, and or engineering culture in general. So we always try to make ourselves available to help folks no matter what your level of expertise, and that gives room for people, and helps people to be given grace and fairness in the midst of growth, which can sometimes be uncomfortable in one's career. So that's something that I really love about this environment. And it sets the groundwork I feel to support junior engineers that are coming up.
Why now is the ideal time to join
Yeah, so we have some super exciting things on the horizon for the future of the platform and user experience on the platform. We're calling one of these initiatives, modernization. And so engineering is collaborating very closely with the product designers to bring a new and improved look and feel to the platform. And this has standardizing the branding, but also providing more value with like interesting, innovative features that will meet more of a user's needs. This is an all-hands-on-deck kind of project that's involving all types of engineers as well as product and other teams. That's a super collaborative but all part of that the big goals for the new year to truly propel the company forward in a way that is very user-centric.
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