Meet Goksan 👋 he joined the tiney team as a Software Engineer just over a year ago after finishing college. We 'virtually' sat down with Goksan to hear about his journey so far with tiney, and hear about how his first ever job is going!
How did you learn how to code?
I started playing a computer game and realised that the people I was playing with were creating custom content in the game. This got me excited so I discovered and started to learn the Lua programming language online, googling random things. I started by building a display in the game showing you how many lives you had left and the rest is history! I loved that you could move tiny pixels around to make something so tangible and enjoyable. This was in 2015 when I was 15 and after getting the bug (excuse the pun 😉) for coding, I joined Ada, the National College for Digital Skills after completing my GCSEs. I was given the support to complete an extended diploma in Computer Science which was the equivalent of three A levels. Being in a college with like minded people really helped me start to learn how to collaborate with others on building cool stuff.
How did you find out about tiney?
The team at Ada have partnerships with tech startups and so my Principal told me all about what tiney were building. I knew I wanted to join a startup because I love building things from scratch and the mission is such an added bonus. Every line of code I write can have an impact on the new generation - that's pretty cool. I met Edd, our CTO who previously founded Graze.com and knew I'd have the support I needed to grow at tiney. He's super approachable, smart and passionate about building a great engineering culture.
What do you do on a day to day basis?
It's very varied, that's for sure. Some days I'm working on our internal tooling called Blocks, the team call me 'Blocksan' sometimes and I even have it on a tshirt! This was the big piece of work I've been working on since joining and I'm super proud of what we've built so far. Blocks is where our Community team can view all of our data about our childminders, my role is to make their lives easier. Looking for things to automate and reduce friction in their daily tasks. A recent example is when we started sending out marketing packs to help our childminders find families, I wrote a script that put individuals names and pictures on the flyers automatically. This saves the team a huge amount of hours and is now a scalable process for the future!
What are you most proud of during your time at tiney?
Sounds a bit cliche, but the progress I've made. This is my first ever job and I'm now a member of an engineering team at a startup. There is a lot going on and it's sometimes hard to keep track of everything but tiney has taught me that you don't need to understand everything, you just play your part. I've not met the majority of our team yet in person, we have quarterly Offsites but Covid got in the way. It's been a surreal year but I feel so valued in the team and my personal growth has been huge!
3 words to describe working at tiney?
🤹 Fun
⛰️ Challenging
🤸♂️ Flexible