Engineering Blog

As engineers at Rally, we’re pretty much free to work on any part of the stack that makes us happy. Some of us love hacking away on javascript to improve user experience. Others gravitate toward things like tackling scalability problems. There are also people who fall into the camp where they enjoy working on the full stack.

I’m definitely the type of developer who enjoys the full stack. In a past life, I was a .NET developer, and for the last year or so that I was in that role I spent as much time writing javascript and tuning T-SQL as writing C#. In the year and a half I’ve been working for Rally, I’ve spent a majority of my time in a role focused on tackling big hairy scalability problems. That means most of my time is spent in Java-land.

As I mentioned before, my team is focused on scalability. At Rally, an engineer’s team goes a long way to determining what skills that engineer gets to exercise at any given time. Contrary to how that might sound, if an engineer happens to land on a highly focused team they won’t necessarily starve other skills forever. People are free to float from team to team any time it makes sense. It hasn’t made sense for me to move away from the scalability work because I’m really enjoying that stuff and because it needs to get done.

Right now, some of our other teams are focusing on taking the Rally UI to the next level. It’s work that’s very heavily focused on javascript. They’re doing some cool stuff and if you’re a Rally user you might get to see it soon. Rally employees are already using it.

Being a former javascript addict, I do miss mucking around on the front end from time to time when I’m deep in Java. Hackathons to the rescue!

I’m in the middle of my hackathon right now. For a variety of reasons, I’m doing nothing but javascript.

It’s awesome.

In previous hackathons, I always decided to tackle problems that were similar to whatever I was working on for production at the time. I’m beginning to think that was a really bad idea. Getting as far away from my day to day work as possible has forced me to be really creative and think about types of problems I haven’t had to deal with on a regular basis. It’s helping me keep the tools sharp.

Spending a week of hackathon working on an area of the app that I haven’t had the opportunity to focus on lately has been refreshing. I had almost forgotten how productive I can be when working in javascript, and for the first time, I’m going to have something really flashy to show at our internal demo as a result of my hackathon.