The software development tech I use today as the Technical Lead at Allianz Trade didn’t even exist two years ago! Keeping up with the pace of change in information technology is almost impossible, even for experts. You could read tech blogs for 10 hours a day and still have more to learn. So, how do you continue to build state-of-the art solutions while also finding the time to stretch your awareness of what’s technically possible?
Promoting knowledge sharing between peers
An effective way to keep pace with evolutions in software is through peer-to-peer information sharing. We in the tech community do this through “guilds”. These are monthly meetups that can be organized in-person or online, and bring together 20-30 people across different teams within a company.
During a guild, one or two people present on a given topic—how a technology is evolving, for example, or about a solution they’ve developed. Then there is time for informal discussion. Ultimately, the goal is to collaborate, share best practices and learn from others in a concentrated amount of time. It’s exciting to exchange with other smart people in your field and get their input. You might walk out of the two-hour meeting and think, “Wow, I didn’t know it could be done that way!” And maybe three months later, you’ll see an opportunity to implement that new technique in your own work.
How a bot was born
At Allianz Trade, several of our most significant innovations were first hatched during guild meetings. One session held at our headquarters in Paris focused on the programming language JavaScript. During the session, we identified that it was taking us too long to deploy a certain type of project. We started brainstorming solutions and came up with a way to standardize our process. This enabled us to copy/paste reusable code—or bootstraps—to get a project up and running in under an hour.
We quickly realized, though, that there was still too much room for unnecessary human error, and we could do better. So, in another guild meeting we discussed the idea of developing a bot that would create these projects for us. The result? A developer can now write a simple command, go brew a cup of coffee, and by the time the coffee is done, the command-line interface (CLI) bot has created a fully functional app!
We quickly realized, though, that there was still too much room for unnecessary human error, and we could do better. So, in another guild meeting we discussed the idea of developing a bot that would create these projects for us. The result? A developer can now write a simple command, go brew a cup of coffee, and by the time the coffee is done, the command-line interface (CLI) bot has created a fully functional app!
The benefits of pushing tech forward
At Allianz Trade, I’ve seen how getting great tech minds together to exchange and learn from each other completely changes the game. In the example above, it led to more automation, which helps us spend less time on maintenance and copy/pasting code, and more time making our credit insurance solutions increasingly user-friendly and full of impact for our clients. Two years from now, we’ll probably be working on tools I can’t even conceive of today. But I know for sure that our innovations will be thanks to our focus on getting the humans behind them together to share their skills and knowledge.
