I recently embarked on my journey as Principle Engineer. If you want to know what that means or how it's going, Ask Me Anything!

Russell Ormes — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 14:00:48 +0000

For the last 4 years my field of expertise has been in highly scalable web applications, focusing on clients built with web components communicated with restful web services written in Javascript that persist to lightning fast postgres instances.

More recently I have taken the path of Principle Engineer and am currently building out an enterprise service platform. This is leveraging good practice from the microservices community and aims to provide the platform on which the company can build out customer facing products taking full advantage of common agile methodologies. Its all about speed of change!

I see the role of Principle Engineer to be one of leadership. What do I mean by this? First that it affords me the time to fully investigate the best solutions for a given set of business requirements, within the constraints of the current Engineering proposition. Then it becomes a job of collaboration with the team to bring them on the journey you have made. If you cannot provide compelling arguments for the decisions you have made, and get the team on board, you haven't got the right answer! It is not the role of the Principle Engineer to dictate the solution but to light the way. The hardest skill to learn is when to disagree and commit (in the Amazon parlance). It is only possible if you do not take your position as one of manager. Only a teacher and collaborator will succeed.

DEV Community: Russell Ormes

I recently embarked on my journey as Principle Engineer. If you want to know what that means or how it's going, Ask Me Anything!