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Unlocking Potential and Empowering Team Members: Kimberly Brown, Head of Information Security and Compliance at Calloquy

Published Sep 28, 2023

Updated Sep 29, 2023

3 min read

In this episode of the Engineering Leadership Series, Tracy Lee sits down with Kimberly Brown, the Head of Information Security and Compliance at Calloquy, for a discussion on engineering leadership. The conversation covers a range of topics, from how Kimberly transitioned into management to her thoughts on team building and individual success.

Kimberly shares her journey into management, which was not something she initially aspired to. It was a mentor who recognized her leadership potential and encouraged her to take on a management role. This natural progression from a developer to a Team Lead and then to a manager allowed her to build on her strengths of helping others grow and collaborate effectively.

Tracy and Kimberly discuss how the tech industry has evolved over the years, with more opportunities for diverse leadership. Kimberly emphasizes the importance of representation, encouraging individuals like her, a woman in tech, to take on leadership roles and pave the way for others.

Kimberly shares her approach to building effective teams, starting with her interview questions. She asks candidates about their biggest mistakes and what they've learned from them, emphasizing the value of learning from failures. She also explores their enthusiasm for their work, regardless of the specific programming language they prefer.

The conversation shifts to how engineering leaders should approach team building. Kimberly emphasizes the importance of understanding team members' individual goals and aligning them with the team's objectives. This approach allows team members to explore different roles and stay motivated throughout their careers. It also fosters creativity and trust among team members.

Kimberly reflects on the lessons she has learned from both good and bad managers. She stresses the importance of active listening, asking "why" to understand decisions better, and clear communication. She also highlights the value of defining the "who, what, why, where, and how" behind any project or goal, as these details are crucial to success.

Tracy and Kimberly discuss how individual contributors can navigate their careers effectively. Kimberly encourages individuals to define what success means to them and communicate it to their managers. She also emphasizes the value of reaching out to your network, asking for help, and not being afraid to explore opportunities outside your current organization if necessary.

Kimberly underscores the importance of being your own advocate and not hesitating to reach out to people, even those who may seem busy or out of reach. She shares her experience of connecting with people on LinkedIn and seeking advice and mentorship, highlighting that the worst that can happen is a polite "no."

A point that was highlighted involved empowering others to take on your responsibilities can lead to career growth. Kimberly encourages individuals to mentor and support their colleagues. This approach can foster a culture of continuous learning and personal development within the team.

Overall, the episode offers insights into engineering leadership, team building, and individual career growth. It highlights the importance of being proactive, seeking mentorship, and continuously defining and pursuing one's goals in the tech industry.

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.

Innovation is NOT Just Creating Something New: Dylani Herath, FinTech Leader

Dylani Herath, a well known FinTech leader who has worked at organizations such as Greenwood, JP Morgan, and FIS sat down with Rob Ocel, Engineering Lead at This Dot Labs and shared some insight on how digital leaders can improve culture and lead successful transformations by balancing business objectives and engineering needs. Dylani began her career with a scholarship that allowed her to work for an engineering company while studying. This experience laid the foundation for her future endeavors in consulting, where she focused on process improvement, quality assurance, automation, and optimization. Eventually, she found herself in the fintech industry, working with large organizations to transform and optimize their engineering processes. Ways to be a Successful Transformative Leader Creating a roadmap with measurable objectives One key aspect of effective leadership is aligning the team's technological capabilities with the organization's transformation initiatives. This alignment ensures that the team is equipped to drive change and achieve the desired outcomes. She emphasizes the importance of tying transformation initiatives to measurable objectives, as this provides a clear roadmap for success. Creating a relationship with your team Another crucial factor in driving transformation is having the right people on board. Dylani highlights the significance of leaders building strong relationships with their staff to foster a collaborative and supportive environment. This enables the team to work together towards common goals and drive change effectively. Building platforms to allow ideas and innovation Creating forums for brainstorming and innovation is another strategy Dylani suggests for engineering leaders. These platforms allow team members to share ideas, think outside the box, and come up with innovative solutions to challenges. By encouraging creativity and collaboration, leaders can harness the full potential of their team. Clear and transparent communication Communication is also a vital aspect of effective leadership. Dylani advises leaders to clearly communicate the reasons behind unpopular decisions, ensuring that they align with the organization's long-term goals. This transparency helps build trust and understanding among team members, even in the face of difficult choices. Incremental transformation, incremental wins Taking innovative solutions such as new AI tools and harnessing the power of those tools, but implementing them incrementally as there are opportunities for transformation within an organization is the best approach versus investing in large initiatives that take a long time to see results. Done incrementally, organizations can gain valuable insights from their data and make informed decisions that drive transformation and optimize processes. Dylani's insights on engineering leadership and championing change provide valuable guidance for leaders looking to drive transformation within their organizations. You can follow her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylaniherath/. You can listen to the podcast here: https://engineeringleadership.podbean.com/e/innovation-is-not-just-creating-something-new-dylani-herath-fintech-leader/...

Jan 10, 2024

3 mins

Engineering Leadership

Are Engineering Leaders Hiding Behind the Data?

Many engineering leaders when they start out find themselves just wanting to please everyone around them. Figuring out how to “own” the role is quite difficult for many. Rob Ocel, Engineering Lead and Tracy Lee, CEO at This Dot explore this topic on this episode. They discuss the idea of hiding behind the data. When decisions are made, it’s easy to ask for data, but then make decisions solely based on that data and not form or “own” an opinion around that decision so you can’t get blamed for an opinion you had. Rob encourages leaders to have opinions and be willing to fight for them. Another topic covered was making people unhappy in a deliberate way. Are you able to succeed doing so, and do you have the ability to “own” that? Rob also emphasizes the need for self-awareness and self-introspection, and to have mentors and accountability partners to help guide decision-making. Listen to the full podcast here: https://engineeringleadership.podbean.com/e/are-engineering-leaders-hiding-behind-the-data-with-robocel-tracy-lee/...

Jan 24, 2024

1 min

Engineering Leadership

D1 SQLite: Writing queries with the D1 Client API

Writing queries with the D1 Client API In the previous post we defined our database schema, got up and running with migrations, and loaded some seed data into our database. In this post we will be working with our new database and seed data. If you want to participate, make sure to follow the steps in the first post. We’ve been taking a minimal approach so far by using only wrangler and sql scripts for our workflow. The D1 Client API has a small surface area. Thanks to the power of SQL, we will have everything we need to construct all types of queries. Before we start writing our queries, let's touch on some important concepts. Prepared statements and parameter binding This is the first section of the docs and it highlights two different ways to write our SQL statements using the client API: prepared and static statements. Best practice is to use prepared statements because they are more performant and prevent SQL injection attacks. So we will write our queries using prepared statements. We need to use parameter binding to build our queries with prepared statements. This is pretty straightforward and there are two variations. By default we add ? ’s to our statement to represent a value to be filled in. The bind method will bind the parameters to each question mark by their index. The first ? is tied to the first parameter in bind, 2nd, etc. I would stick with this most of the time to avoid any confusion. ` I like this second method less as it feels like something I can imagine messing up very innocently. You can add a number directly after a question mark to indicate which number parameter it should be bound to. In this exampl, we reverse the previous binding. ` Reusing prepared statements If we take the first example above and not bind any values we have a statement that can be reused: ` Querying For the purposes of this post we will just build example queries by writing them out directly in our Worker fetch handler. If you are building an app I would recommend building functions or some other abstraction around your queries. select queries Let's write our first query against our data set to get our feet wet. Here’s the initial worker code and a query for all authors: ` We pass our SQL statement into prepare and use the all method to get all the rows. Notice that we are able to pass our types to a generic parameter in all. This allows us to get a fully typed response from our query. We can run our worker with npm run dev and access it at http://localhost:8787 by default. We’ll keep this simple workflow of writing queries and passing them as a json response for inspection in the browser. Opening the page we get our author results. joins Not using an ORM means we have full control over our own destiny. Like anything else though, this has tradeoffs. Let’s look at a query to fetch the list of posts that includes author and tags information. ` Let’s walk through each part of the query and highlight some pros and cons. ` * The query selects all columns from the posts table. * It also selects the name column from the authors table and renames it to author_name. * It aggregates the name column from the tags table into a JSON array. If there are no tags, it returns an empty JSON array. This aggregated result is renamed to tags. ` * The query starts by selecting data from the posts table. * It then joins the authors table to include author information for each post, matching posts to authors using the author_id column in posts and the id column in authors. * Next, it left joins the posts_tags table to include tag associations for each post, ensuring that all posts are included even if they have no tags. * Next, it left joins the tags table to include tag names, matching tags to posts using the tag_id column in posts_tags and the id column in tags. * Finally, group the results by the post id so that all rows with the same post id are combined in a single row SQL provides a lot of power to query our data in interesting ways. JOIN ’s will typically be more performant than performing additional queries.You could just as easily write a simpler version of this query that uses subqueries to fetch post tags and join all the data by hand with JavaScript. This is the nice thing about writing SQL, you’re free to fetch and handle your data how you please. Our results should look similar to this: ` This brings us to our next topic. Marshaling / coercing result data A couple of things we notice about the format of the result data our query provides: Rows are flat. We join the author directly onto the post and prefix its column names with author. ` Using an ORM we might get the data back as a child object: ` Another thing is that our tags data is a JSON string and not a JavaScript array. This means that we will need to parse it ourselves. ` This isn’t the end of the world but it is some more work on our end to coerce the result data into the format that we actually want. This problem is handled in most ORM’s and is their main selling point in my opinion. insert / update / delete Next, let’s write a function that will add a new post to our database. ` There’s a few queries involved in our create post function: * first we create the new post * next we run through the tags and either create or return an existing tag * finally, we add entries to our post_tags join table to associate our new post with the tags assigned We can test our new function by providing post content in query params on our index page and formatting them for our function. ` I gave it a run like this: http://localhost:8787authorId=1&tags=Food%2CReview&title=A+review+of+my+favorite+Italian+restaurant&content=I+got+the+sausage+orchette+and+it+was+amazing.+I+wish+that+instead+of+baby+broccoli+they+used+rapini.+Otherwise+it+was+a+perfect+dish+and+the+vibes+were+great And got a new post with the id 11. UPDATE and DELETE operations are pretty similar to what we’ve seen so far. Most complexity in your queries will be similar to what we’ve seen in the posts query where we want to JOIN or GROUP BY data in various ways. To update the post we can write a query that looks like this: ` COALESCE acts similarly to if we had written a ?? b in JavaScript. If the binded value that we provide is null it will fall back to the default. We can delete our new post with a simple DELETE query: ` Transactions / Batching One thing to note with D1 is that I don’t think the traditional style of SQLite transactions are supported. You can use the db.batch API to achieve similar functionality though. According to the docs: Batched statements are SQL transactions ↗. If a statement in the sequence fails, then an error is returned for that specific statement, and it aborts or rolls back the entire sequence. ` Summary In this post, we've taken a hands-on approach to exploring the D1 Client API, starting with defining our database schema and loading seed data. We then dove into writing queries, covering the basics of prepared statements and parameter binding, before moving on to more complex topics like joins and transactions. We saw how to construct and execute queries to fetch data from our database, including how to handle relationships between tables and marshal result data into a usable format. We also touched on inserting, updating, and deleting data, and how to use transactions to ensure data consistency. By working through these examples, we've gained a solid understanding of how to use the D1 Client API to interact with our database and build robust, data-driven applications....

Dec 23, 2024

6 mins

JavaScript

Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation

Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation Why Build a Stripe App? I recently participated in an audio space with the Stripe team, and something they said really stuck with me: the Stripe app store is a growing area that isn't overly saturated yet. There's a lot of potential for new apps, and companies can use this opportunity to grow. I work at a company called This Dot Labs, and we've created several Stripe apps and even own one. After looking at the data, I can confirm that the Stripe team was right! Creating a QR Code Generator App For this tutorial, we'll build a QR code app that can take a URL and generate a code for it. This is a good use case to help you understand the ins and outs of Stripe's developer tools. Why QR Codes? QR codes are useful tools that have become common in e-commerce, restaurants, and other industries. While Stripe already has a QR code tool, we'll make our own to familiarize ourselves with their syntax and problem-solving approaches. Project Structure Before we dive into the implementation, let's look at the structure of our Stripe App QR Code project: * .vscode: Contains settings for Visual Studio Code * source/views: Holds the main application views * .gitignore: Specifies files to ignore in version control * stripe-app.json: Defines the Stripe app configuration * ui-extensions.d.ts: TypeScript declaration file for UI extensions * .build: this is where the built Stripe app gets placed. Step-by-Step Implementation 1\. Install Stripe Locally First, you need to install Stripe on your local machine. The documentation provides great instructions for this: * For Mac users: Use Brew to install * For Windows users: Download the package and add it to your environment variables You can find the details here in the stripe docs to install the Stripe CLI https://docs.stripe.com/stripe-cli When using Windows, you must do stripe login from Powershell, NOT from Git bash or any other tool. After the server is up, then you can continue using git bash for everything else. After stripe login, you need to enter stripe apps start. Once you do that, the server is up and running and you can go back to using git bash or any other tool. 2\. Install Dependencies We'll be using an extra package for QR code generation. Install it using npm: ` 3\. Set Up the Main Component Let's look at the home.tsx file, where we'll use Stripe's UI components: ` These components are similar to other UI libraries like Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS. 4\. Create the UI Structure Our app will have: * An input field for the URL * Validation using a regex pattern * Error handling for invalid URLs * QR code generation and display Here is the Home.tsx file that is located in the src/views folder ` * ContextView` is at the top level of the app where we see the Title and the link to the Stripe Docs that we placed in our Context View. * Box is how you use Divs. * Banners can be used to show notification errors or any other item you wish to display. * Textfields are input fields. * Everything else is pretty self-explanatory. 5\. Handle Content Security Policy One problem I personally ran into was when I tried to redirect users, the Stripe policies would block it since I did not express that I knew what it was doing. I had to go into the stripe-app.json file and mention the specific security policies. For this particular exercise, I kept these as null. This is my stripe-app.json file. ` 6\. Configure App Views As you can see here, the stripe-app.json file shows the views for each file I have. The Home.tsx file and the Invoice.tsx are also included This is our way of saying that for each view we have, show the app functionality on that page. Our stripe-app.json file will show it but also, the manifest.js file in our .build folder will also show the same. Any view that doesn't have a file will not show the application's functionality. So, if I were to go to transactions, the app would not show the same logic as the home or invoices page. By following these steps, you'll have a fully functional QR code generator app for Stripe. This is just a simple example, but the potential for Stripe apps is massive, especially for businesses serving e-commerce customers. If you need help or get stuck, don't hesitate to reach out, danny.thompson@thisdot.co. The Stripe team is also very active in answering questions, so leverage them as a resource. Happy coding!...

Dec 18, 2024

4 mins

stripe

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Unlocking Potential and Empowering Team Members: Kimberly Brown, Head of Information Security and Compliance at Calloquy

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Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation

Let's innovate together!

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Innovation is NOT Just Creating Something New: Dylani Herath, FinTech Leader

Are Engineering Leaders Hiding Behind the Data?

D1 SQLite: Writing queries with the D1 Client API

Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation