General

Tech Turnarounds and Unveiling Health Tech's Potential: Insights from Fractional C-Suite Executive Denise Smith

Published Aug 16, 2023

Updated Aug 16, 2023

2 min read

Tracy Lee sits down with Denise Smith, an accomplished fractional C-suite executive specializing in technology turnarounds, mergers, and acquisitions. In this conversation, they explore the world of health tech, and discuss the critical role engineering leaders play in understanding and navigating the financial aspects of their businesses.

Denise’s journey into the tech world began with a degree in chemistry from Spelman College. She found her niche in technology by coding SQL databases and working on Y2K projects. This pivot marked her entry into technology consulting and set the stage for her career in the industry. Her current role involves being a fractional C-suite executive, such as a CTO, CEO, or COO, for companies in need of turnaround expertise or support during mergers and acquisitions.

The Exciting Landscape of Health Tech:

Denise's specialization in health tech offers her unique insights into the convergence of technology and healthcare. She highlights the opportunities to leverage technology to help people thrive in the digital age, focusing on digital equity and how solutions can empower populations to access vital information quickly. In the context of health tech, technology can play a crucial role in aiding first responders during emergencies and improving overall response times.

Pivoting and Adaptation in the Face of Challenges:

The interview explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tech companies, particularly those focusing on COVID-related solutions. Denise acknowledges that many companies faced challenges when the immediate need for their products diminished as the pandemic situation improved. She emphasizes the importance of pivoting business strategies to discover new opportunities and income streams. Denise's role often involves analyzing customer segments and generating product roadmaps to drive revenue growth.

Guiding Principles for Successful Leadership:

Denise's expertise extends beyond technology to financial literacy and leadership strategy. She emphasizes the significance of engineering leaders understanding their company's financials, such as customer acquisition costs and customer long-term value. This knowledge empowers leaders to make informed decisions and contribute to the overall growth and success of the business. Additionally, she stresses the importance of empathetic leadership and fostering a positive company culture during times of change and adaptation.

Unexpected Paths to Leadership Success:

One of the standout aspects of the interview is Denise's recommendation to explore unconventional routes for leadership development. She shares her experience with the BLCK VC program (Black Venture Capital), which exposed her to venture funding and financial insights that significantly impacted her leadership journey. Denise's story underscores the value of embracing unique learning opportunities that broaden leadership skillsets.

Denise Smith's insightful interview provides valuable takeaways for engineering leaders seeking to navigate business challenges and drive growth. From understanding financial metrics to fostering empathy and embracing non-traditional learning experiences, her journey and expertise offer a refreshing perspective on the intersection of technology, leadership, and business success.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

Challenges of Growing into a Software Leadership Role with Gant Laborde

In this episode, Rob Ocel sits down with Gant Laborde, CIO at Infinite Red, to explore Gant's journey in the tech industry, his transition into leadership, and his role as a Chief Innovation Officer. Gant shares insights into the challenges and rewards of innovation within a company, how to manage upward and downward effectively, and the importance of trust in leadership. They also discuss the evolving landscape of AI, the significance of experimentation, and the courage needed to make bold decisions. Chapters Introduction and Opening Remarks - 00:00 Gant's Background and Journey in Tech - 02:05 Transitioning to Leadership at Infinite Red - 05:08 Defining Innovation at an Agency - 07:28 The Role of AI in React Native - 09:39 Navigating the Hype and Troughs of Technology - 11:35 The Challenges of Middle Management - 15:12 Building Trust and Managing Upwards - 16:25 Empowering Teams and Passing the Torch - 19:40 Developing Courage and Taking Risks - 22:30 Why Leadership is Worth It - 30:28 Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up - 31:53 Follow Gant Laborde on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/GantLaborde Github: https://github.com/GantMan Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gant-laborde/ Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@gantlaborde...

Aug 30, 2024

1 min

Engineering LeadershipSoftware Engineering

Systemized Problem Solving in Engineering Leadership Using Data with Ankur Jain

What is it like to transition from technologies to Fractional CTO? How much do systems matter when operating at the C Level? Ankur Jain, Fractional CTO and Founder at Sprout discusses the transition from being a technologist to a fractional CTO, and how to define and meet engineering KPIs. He emphasizes the significance of systemizing and design thinking in problem-solving, stressing the need to understand customer needs and deliver effective solutions. By adopting a systematic approach, businesses can effectively identify and address customer needs. Design thinking, on the other hand, encourages a human-centered approach to innovation, ensuring that technology solutions are not only functional but also user-friendly. Ankur insights remind us that successful technology implementation requires a deep understanding of customer pain points and a commitment to delivering effective solutions. In an era where data is abundant, Ankur emphasizes the value of making data-driven decisions. However, he cautions against relying on biased data, which can lead to flawed conclusions. He advises businesses to carefully analyze and interpret data, ensuring that it aligns with the goals and objectives of the organization. By leveraging data effectively, businesses can gain valuable insights, make informed decisions, and drive growth. Ankur highlights the significance of ensuring product-market fit by closely collaborating with early customers. By actively involving customers in the development process, businesses can gain valuable feedback and insights, ensuring that their products or services meet the needs of the target market. Ankur's emphasis on customer collaboration serves as a reminder that successful technology implementation requires a customer-centric approach, where the end-users' needs and preferences are at the forefront of decision-making. Ankur advocates for mentorship and continuous learning in leadership roles. He emphasizes the value of seeking guidance from experienced professionals and gradually growing within organizations. His insights remind us that leadership is a journey of growth and development, and that embracing mentorship and continuous learning can help individuals navigate the complexities of technology leadership more effectively. Download this episode here....

Jul 26, 2024

2 mins

Engineering LeadershipSoftware Engineering

Enhancing Your Playwright Workflow: A Guide to the VSCode Extension

Introduction In my last post, Quick Guide to Playwright Fixtures: Enhancing Your Tests, I delved into some of the enhancements we've been implementing in our end-to-end (E2E) tests using Playwright. As I refine our testing strategies, I've come across a tool that has quickly become an essential part of my workflow: the Playwright VSCode extension. If you're like me and constantly looking for ways to streamline testing and debugging, you'll appreciate any tool that can make the process more efficient and enjoyable. That's where this extension comes in. It's not just about writing tests - it's about enhancing the entire development experience. In this post, I'll walk you through getting started with the Playwright VSCode extension, sharing some tips and tricks that have made a real difference in my day-to-day work. Installing the Extension & Basic Setup Before diving into the Playwright VSCode extension, it's essential to have Playwright installed on your machine. If you haven't done so already, you can quickly install it by running: ` This command will set up Playwright and ensure all necessary dependencies are installed. Once Playwright is ready, the VSCode extension will be installed next. Open Visual Studio Code, navigate to the Extensions view by clicking on the Extensions icon in the Activity Bar on the side of the window, and search for “Playwright”. The official extension, ID: ms-playwright.playwright / named: “Playwright Test for VSCode” by Microsoft, should appear at the top of the list. Click "Install," and you're all set. With the extension installed, you can start leveraging its powerful features to enhance your Playwright testing workflow within VSCode. Running the Tests and Identifying Outputs To run a test, simply open the test file in VSCode. The Playwright extension will automatically detect test files and display a "Run" icon next to each test and test suite. You can click on this icon to run individual tests or test suites. Alternatively, you can run all the tests in your project using the Playwright Test Explorer, accessible from the sidebar. Once you start running your tests, the extension provides real-time feedback within the editor. You'll see the status of each test - whether it passes, fails, or is skipped - right next to the corresponding test in your code. This immediate feedback loop is incredibly helpful for catching issues as you write your tests. The output of your tests will be displayed in the VSCode terminal. You'll see detailed information about each test run. Debugging Step-by-Step I find debugging particularly useful when a test fails unexpectedly or when I want to verify that certain actions are being performed as intended. Instead of guessing what might be wrong, I can see exactly what's going on in each test step, making debugging a much more straightforward and less frustrating process. To start debugging, you can easily set a breakpoint in your test file by clicking on the left margin next to the line number where you'd like the execution to pause. Once your breakpoints are in place, you can initiate the debug process by selecting the "Debug" option next to the test you'd like to investigate. Once the debugger is running, the extension allows you to step through your code, inspect variables, and evaluate expressions - all within VSCode. This real-time insight into your test execution is a game-changer, enabling you to pinpoint issues more effectively and confidently refine your tests. Using the Pick Locator Tool Another handy feature is the "Pick Locator" tool. If you've ever struggled with selecting the right element in your tests, this tool can be a time saver. It helps you generate reliable locators by letting you interact directly with the webpage elements you want to target. To use the Pick Locator tool, click the "Pick Locator" button in the Playwright Test Explorer. This will open a new window where you can navigate to the site you're testing. As you hover over elements on the page, the tool will suggest locators, allowing you to select the most appropriate one for your test. While the Pick Locator tool is handy, it’s important to ensure that the locators you generate are robust and maintainable. This is especially true when integrating them with the fixtures I discussed in my previous blog post. Combining the proper locators with well-designed fixtures can create more reliable and reusable test setups, ultimately making your E2E tests more efficient. Conclusion The Playwright VSCode extension has quickly become indispensable in my development workflow. It significantly enhanced my experience of writing and running Playwright tests. Whether you’re just starting with Playwright or looking to optimize your existing tests, this extension offers a range of features that can save you time and effort. Combining these tools with thoughtful test design, such as leveraging fixtures, you can create a more efficient and effective testing process. I hope this guide has given you a good overview of what the Playwright VSCode extension can do and how it can benefit your work. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend giving it a go. And as always, feel free to explore further and experiment with the features that best suit your needs....

Sep 6, 2024

5 mins

VSCodeTestingPlaywright

D1 SQLite: Schema, migrations and seeds

I’ve written posts about some of the popular ORM’s in TypeScript and covered their pros and cons. Prisma is probably the most well known and Drizzle is a really popular up and comer. I like and use ORM’s in most of my projects but there’s also a camp of folks who believe they shouldn’t be used. I started a small Cloudflare Workers project recently and decided to try using their D1 SQLite database without adding any ORM. This is the first post in a 2 part series where we’ll explore what this experience is like using only the driver and utilities made available in the Wrangler CLI. Introduction If you’re unfamiliar with Cloudflare D1 - it’s a distributed SQLite database for the Cloudflare Workers platform. Workers are lightweight serverless functions/compute distributed across a global network. The platform includes services and API’s like D1 that provide extended capabilities to your Workers. At the time of this writing, there are only two ways to interact with a D1 database that I’m aware of. * From a Worker using the D1 Client API * D1 HTTP API In this 2 part series, we will create a simple Workers project and use the D1 Client API to build out our queries. Getting Started For this tutorial, we’ll create a simple Cloudflare Worker project and treat it like a simple node script/http server to do our experiments. The first step is initializing a new Cloudflare Worker and D1 database: ` ` We need to take our binding and add it to our project wrangler.toml configuration. Once our binding is added we can re-generate the types for our Worker project. ` We now have our DB binding added to our project Env types. Let’s add a simple query to our worker script to make sure our database is setup and working: ` Start the development server with npm run dev and access the server at http://localhost:8787 . When the page loads we should see a successful result {"1 + 1":2} . We now have a working SQLite database available. Creating a schema Since we’re not using an ORM with some kind of DSL to define a schema for our database, we’re going to do things the old fashioned way. “Schema” will just refer to the data model that we create for our database. We’ll define it using SQL and the D1 migrations utility. Let’s create a migration to define our initial schema: ` For our demo purposes we will build out a simple blog application database. It includes posts, authors, and tags to include some relational data. We need to write the SQL in our migration to create all the tables and columns that we need: ` The SQL above defines our tables, columns, and their relations with foreign keys. It also includes a join table for posts and tags to represent a many-to-many relationship. If you don’t have a lot of experience writing SQL queries it might look a little bit intimidating at first. Once you take some time to learn it it’s actually pretty nice. DataLemur is a pretty great resource for learning SQL. If you need help with a specific query, Copilot and GPT are quite good at generating SQL queries. Just make sure you take some time to try to understand them and check for any potential issues. After completing a migration script it needs to be applied: ` I added the --local flag so that we’re working against a local database for now. Typing our Schema One of the downsides of our ORMless approach is we don’t get TypeScript types out of the box. In a smaller project, I think the easiest approach is just to manage your own types. It’s not hard, you can even have GPT help if you want. If managing type definitions for your schema is not acceptable for your project or use case you can look for a code generation tool or switch to an ORM / toolset that provides types. For this example I created some basic types to map to our schema so that we can get help from the lsp when working with our queries. ` Seeding development data Outside of our migrations, we can write SQL scripts and execute them against our D1 SQLite database using wrangler. To start we can create a simple seeds/dev.sql script to load some initial development seed data into our local database. Another example might be a reset.sql that drops all of our tables so we can easily reset our database during development as we rework the schema or run other experiments. Since our database is using auto incrementing integer ID’s, we can know up front what the ID’s for the rows we are creating are since our database is initially empty. This can be a bit tricky if you’re using randomly generated ID’s. In that case you would probably want to write a script that can collect ID’s of newly created records and use them for creating related records. Here we are just passing the integer ID directly in our SQL script. As an example, we know up front that the author Alice Smith will have the id 1, Bob Johnson 2, and so on. Post_tags looks a little bit crazy since it’s just a join table. Each row is just a post_id and a tag_id. (1, 1), (1 2), etc. Here’s the code for a dev seed script: ` Here’s the code for a reset script - it’s important to remember to drop the migrations table in your reset so you can apply your migrations. ` Using the wrangler CLI we can execute our script files against our local development and remote d1 database instances. Since we have already applied our migrations to our local database, we can use our dev.sql seed script to load some data into our db. ` The Wrangler output is pretty helpful - it lets us know to add the --remote flag to run against our remote instance. We can also use execute to run commands against our database. Lets run a select to look at the data added to our posts table. ` This command should output a table showing the columns of our db and the 7 rows we added from the dev seed script. Summary Using wrangler and the Cloudflare D1 platform we’ve already gotten pretty far without an ORM or any other additional tooling. We have a simple but effective migrations system in place and some initial scripts for easily seeding and resetting our databases. There are also some other really great things built-in to the D1 platform like time travel and backups. I definitely recommend at least skimming through the documentation at some point. In the next post we will start interacting with our database and sample data using the D1 Client API....

Aug 30, 2024

5 mins

Cloudflare

Let's innovate together!

We're ready to be your trusted technical partners in your digital innovation journey.

Whether it's modernization or custom software solutions, our team of experts can guide you through best practices and how to build scalable, performant software that lasts.

Tech Turnarounds and Unveiling Health Tech's Potential: Insights from Fractional C-Suite Executive Denise Smith

You might also like

Challenges of Growing into a Software Leadership Role with Gant Laborde

Systemized Problem Solving in Engineering Leadership Using Data with Ankur Jain

Enhancing Your Playwright Workflow: A Guide to the VSCode Extension

D1 SQLite: Schema, migrations and seeds

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Challenges of Growing into a Software Leadership Role with Gant Laborde

Systemized Problem Solving in Engineering Leadership Using Data with Ankur Jain

Enhancing Your Playwright Workflow: A Guide to the VSCode Extension

D1 SQLite: Schema, migrations and seeds