The Buffer Overflow Podcast Buffer

Evolving the teams with Product Management - hear about the apps team product management journey at Buffer!

On this week's episode, join Jordan and Joe as they reflect on the apps team product management (PM) journey with our now-PM, Steve! Up until this year, the apps team at Buffer has never had a product manager - this is a role we've always tried to fulfil amongst ourselves, or relied on other teams at Buffer to support with. Now that we have a PM and are experiencing some great changes to our team and how we work, we take a few moments to reflect on how we've previously been working, with how we are seeing things adapt now.

We hope you enjoy this week's episode and feel free to continue the discussion online with us at @bufferdevs!

The Journey from Support to Engineering - hear from Mick on how he made a change in his career at Buffer!

On this week's episode, join Jordan and Joe as they learn about our guest's path from a support role at Buffer to an engineer! Mick began his Buffer journey running support, and it was (and is!) something he does very well! Along the way, he learned the product inside and out and recognized things that would block or slow down the team or customers. So, he turned to learning code as a way to create new things to speed up internal processes and flows. Eventually, he made the jump from support to engineering! This week, we unpack what that journey looked like for him.

We hope you enjoy this week's episode and feel free to continue the discussion online with us at @bufferdevs!

Timecodes


Introduction: 0:42
First role at Buffer: 1:45
Current role: 3:38
Inflection point: 5:20
Learning a new discipline: 9:00
Juggling Roles: 14:20
Context switching: 16:00
Advice for those looking to switch to a new role: 21:30
Outro: 26:00

Side projects - they are everywhere in the tech industry.

On this week's episode, join Jordan and Joe as they unpack the impact of side projects. After all, Buffer itself is the result of our CEO's side project endeavors! We chat about them in terms of our careers, how to manage them, what they can help bring to the table as well as the not-so-great bits about them. Further, we ask the question - should you even have one at all? It's easy to feel left behind in the development world if you don't, but there's more to the story. We hope you enjoy this week's episode and feel free to continue the discussion online with us at @bufferdevs!

Timecodes


2:00 - What side projects do we have?
2:15 - Jordan > Spend Stack
3:15 - Jordan > A Best-in-Class iOS App: The Book
4:00 - Joe > Minimize
5:00- Joe > Compose Academy
7:30 - Good Things about Side Projects
7:45 - Learning new skills
8:44 - Skills bleed over between your job and a side project
12:50 - Mindfulness and Side Projects
13:45 - You won’t know it all or be able to learn it all
16:35 - Work Life Balance
17:00 - When do you work on it?
20:34 - It’s fine to go slow and be slow
21:10 - It’s also fine to have *zero* side projects
23:10 - Until next time

Within the Engineering team at Buffer we have several front-end teams working on different parts of the product. Whilst it is important to create a space for continued learning for these teams, there are also a lot of shared goals. To ensure that these teams are able to collaborate on these goals, frequent gatherings take place to create a space to learn from one another and help move tasks forward.

Ana Almeida, who is a Senior Engineer working on the Front-End of Buffer, facilitates these syncs and takes some time in this episode to share her experiences! Here we cover:


What the front end syncs are being used for
How they're helping to push the team forward
How they're helping to bring the teams together in a remote environment
What the role looks like for someone facilitating the syncs and any guidance for others looking to do the same thing
...and more!

We hope you enjoy this episode of Overflow!

The Self Taught Developer

It's a term we hear more often these days - "I'm self taught!". What seemed like a rarity years ago has been increasingly more common in our industry, so today we sat down with our engineer on staff who taught himself programming (one of 11 at Buffer!) - Hamish Macpherson!

Hamish is a senior engineer who works primarily on the front-end of Buffer. In this episode, we cover:


His journey to learning programming
How early jobs and projects helped him level up quickly
Resources and communities to learn from
Dealing with an initial rejection from Buffer when applying the first time, and how he took feedback in and improved to land the job the second time
...and more!



We hope you enjoy this episode of Overflow! Feel free to reach us online to chat about today's episode anytime:


Buffer (@buffer)
Jordan (@jordanmorgan10)
Joe (@hitherejoe)
Hamish (@hamstu)

This week, Jordan and Joe discuss a topic that many engineers have needed to adapt to in recent times: Working Remotely.

Many of us have been forced to work remotely due to the happenings around COVID. Both Jordan and Joe have been working remotely at Buffer, collectively for over 8 years. In this episode we share our personal experiences for working remotely, as well as some guidance on what we do to make things work well for us.