The link you received provides an overview of my background, what you can expect from me, and what I expect from you.
I have 15+ years of experience working with small, medium, and large companies. I've been on teams which practiced TDD, Event-Driven Design, Domain Driven Design, Event-Sourcing, Message-Oriented Architectures; Mob Programming, Pair Programming, and working individually; Fully Distributed, Hybrid Distributed, and office-only. I've built profitable (and non-profitable) systems end-to-end from scratch, with and without frameworks, either as a solo developer Startup or together as a team. I've also been on teams owning a codebase which had no tests, they never interacted with the business, and didn't know any other way of working.
My main interest and background is Software Engineering.
However, given my passion and multipotentiality I also have extensive experience on a diversity set of roles within software development. That includes knowledge and experience in Psychology (IQ, Big 5, etc.), User Experience (UX, Web Design), Public Relations, Product Management / Customer Behaviour Analysis, Finance / Cloud Billing Management, Ops, Marketing/Advertising, and Technical Content Marketing (blog posts).
I have a track record of improving teams in the long-term by 10x as a peer without being in a management role.
I have created the popular Open Source library js-cookie, which is downloaded a staggering 22 billion times every year.
I also have a personal blog which is a non-profit initiative to write about forgotten fundamentals of software. I post 30% of all links I read on my Reddit account and HackerNews account. I have also contributed to a few Open Source projects such as impress.js and jquery-cookie (a jQuery project).
I've been through a few cycles in the software industry where Old Is the New New. Whatever you're doing, it's probably the same thing I've seen before, only with a new name.
Fagner was a great addition to the team and offered keen insights and new perspectives that helped to improve both our technical proficiency as well as the processes around the delivery of our project.
— Michael, Lead Technical Consultant at Lexicon Digital
Fagner is a capable, hardworking, intelligent and skilful developer. His sound knowledge of software development principles and team dynamics have proven very helpful to delivering complex projects and solutions. His focus on interpersonal relationships and collaborative working have made him an asset to the team, and his willingness to provide insights and views on digital excellence are always a welcome addition.
— Kay Shapievsky, Tech Lead at IAG (NRMA)
Despite Fagner mentoring our team for only a relatively short duration (1 month), his coaching was incredibly beneficial to the team in improving our engineering/design processes where his advice on key important concepts was very thoughtful, carefully-put, and hence provided a lot of long-term value to our team.
With Fagner's background of working with many different kinds of teams, he effectively used his experience to help improve the teamwork of our team. Along with his passion for engineering/developing software, he combined these traits of his to effectively coach our team on how to improve code quality effectively with teamwork.
Overall, Fagner was very skilled, friendly, and a pleasure to work with where his expertise in software development combined with his passion on understanding the philosophy of a team makes him an exceptional coach or addition to a team. I've personally learnt an abundant amount from him and hope that we touch base again in the future.
— Lorenzo Paras, Software Engineer at Service NSW
Understanding a wide range of concepts and techniques around team work, efficiency and software engineering itself, Fagner becomes an invaluable member for any company.
He communicates without noise, and guarantees that any detail that is unclear is brought up and discussed with the team so that everybody is on the same page.
Fagner is also very pragmatic on his coding and self management approach, and passionate about mentoring others.
— Gustavo Henke, Front-End Engineer at Canva
One interesting thing that people told me in my previous roles is that I don't need to be managed. Maybe that's because I have experience on working in teams with diverse skillsets and personalities. For that reason, I've developed the ability to predict potential interpersonal issues that either myself or somebody else may encounter. That allows me to help raising expectations clearly and early to the relevant stakeholders, including to "manage up".
However, depending on the personality differences of each peer and their values or ways of working, reaching common ground can take as little as days and as much as weeks. It's better to be aware of Tuckman's curve and to not give up once the Storming/Norming phase starts to kick in.
Below is an overview of my personality traits according to the Big 5:
Interpretation
- Low Agreeableness means: Expect me to challenge you technically, both in ways of working and in coding, though not in a confronting way and with an open-mind.
- High Conscientiousness means: My work will be disciplined and deliberate, asking many questions to fill all gaps, focusing on the outcome not the output.
- Above Average Emotion Stability means: Pressure won't make me fall into the trap of doing a bad job or to work overtime. I'll use the time I have to do the best I can.
- High Intellect/Imagination means: I will bring perspectives you may not have thought of or things you haven't seen, and they will make sense to you. Some of them require investment, but I'll put all options on the table with the input of everyone, so that you can make the best decision.
- To allow me to learn and fail safely, as much as I'll allow you too.
- To provide clear processes, practices, accountability and responsibility.
- To listen and make feedback occur as often as possible and to be as specific as possible.
- To ask for clarification on topics and interactions between us that are confusing.
- To ask me questions to help you make better choices, or allow me to ask you questions to help me make better choices.
- To work actively towards reducing my own Truck Factor.
- To understand the full picture of the problem and how it relates to the relevant stakeholders before I can help developing a solution.
- To respect your opinions and support your decisions, even if I disagree with them.
- To help in other responsibilities I might have skills to assist.
In the spirit of the Agile and the Software Crafters manifesto. Here are my values, with the same essential caveat of:
While there is value in the items on the right, I value the items on the left more
- Company Values over Team Values over Individual Values
- Solving Problems over Applying Recipes
- Quality over Quantity
- Impact over Income
- Mentoring over Managing
- Forecast over Estimation
- Fundamentals over Implementations
- Products over Projects
- Knowledge over Tooling
- Lean Approaches over Big Bang