I’m Charles B, a Software Engineer from Barranquilla, Colombia, with a master’s degree in Project Management and have experience building startups, creating software products, and leading engineering and data teams. I have been coding for over 13 years and want to share my day at Ideaware.

What do you do first thing in the morning?

I wake up around 7 am, go to the kitchen, drink a glass of water, and start preparing coffee with cinnamon. Then, I shower, put on comfy clothes, and am ready to go to my office room.

How do you begin your working day?

Not every day is the same, but generally, I join a 30-min quick preparation call where I sync with other leaders about different non-engineering projects’ status and discuss the previous day’s results and the priorities for the ongoing day. I check my messages: Slack and email (even though we rarely use them to communicate), upcoming meetings, and review our sprint management platform to have an overview of the pending tasks and priorities of the current sprint. I have sessions with other senior leaders, which sometimes includes the company CEO, twice a week to chat about engineering progress and align recent sprint execution with business priorities and expectations.

What are the best things about Ideaware?

 Ideaware has clients with exciting projects, technologies, frameworks, and coding languages. Working with a client is like being part of that company. You get treated as if you were part of the team with no differentiation. Some clients have Ideaware engineers, designers, quality assurance, and customer support, which is nice because it makes the company diverse and exciting.

What tools do you use to manage your projects?

We use Monday.com integrated with GitHub. Also, the whole company uses Monday.com and has access to their relevant workspaces, so we handle a significant part of the communication related to tasks, epics, and projects through this tool. To get more details, we discuss through Slack and keep the discussion asynchronous, but for deeper conversations, we may have quick syncs through Meets, Zoom, or even Slack Huddles.

What are your current challenges?

My main goal is to lead the construction of a new product that would take the business to a new level. So, my challenge is to fully understand how the industry works from a strategic perspective, help find opportunities that could leverage technology, build the team for it, and manage the whole process.

 I’m working in a new industry where I don’t have previous experience, so I have a bunch of things to learn to meet my goal, which is very challenging but still fascinating and enriching. The best part is that all my teammates are always willing to teach me everything, encourage me to ask many questions, and cut me some slack to catch up.

What is the most exciting thing that has happened to you working at Ideaware?

I could mention a few, but I think the main ones for me have been parties organized by Ideaware and a trip to San Francisco sponsored by the client.

On the one hand, Ideaware recognizes the importance of human connections and encourages it in different ways; one of them is organizing fun parties and getting the whole company into an in-person experience.

On the other hand, in my case, the client wanted to meet me in person to help me build a stronger relationship with other leaders, so they invited me to spend a week working in San Francisco with other teammates from the US.

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