Development

TIQQE leadership program


Last september we started the TIQQE Leadership program. In this post I am going to tell you about my personal experience and reflections I did about it.

Change is constantly in our life. You deal with changes all the time: in your job, in your everyday life and in your relationships, with others and with yourself. 
Everything changes, everything evolves and you can’t stop that.
The only way to not be left behind, stuck in your safe bubble you have hardly built, is to embrace changes, to be a part of them. 

Embracing changes forces you to continuously question yourself and actively decide to make actions that could lead to failure, loss or even force you to start from scratch, again. And sure, that can be scary but it is the only way to grow and to improve yourself.
Embracing and being part of change is fundamental in a developers life.
In fact, IT leads the evolution and in the last two decades we have witnessed a real and true revolution in the sector.
Software has pervaded our lives and reshaped them.

The way of developing software evolved, so did the role of the developer.
Working in a team, having good communication with colleagues and customers, feeling empathy, being flexible and able to adapt, listening and supporting, being nice, depersonalizing, taking responsibilities and having leadership skills, are all qualities that a developer should have to be successful. 

Mastering one programming language to develop a certain kind of product on a specific infrastructure is not enough and valuable anymore.
What is important instead, is the attitude to never stop learning, to start from scratch again with a new technology.
Being ready and prepared to challenge yourself is precious. 
Despite the name, soft skills are not easy to master at all, and in order to achieve some of them you really need to be prepared to work on yourself.
Not all the IT companies have realized that yet and above all not all of them dare to change.

Receiving the invitation to join the TIQQE leadership program was for me, like receiving a message saying “we believe in you, we are investing in you”.
That was really nice. I got really thrilled about the idea that I was receiving a great opportunity to work on and improve my soft skills.
The program had the aim of working and practicing with some really simple but powerful tools and making their use a habit, something that is a natural part of our way to work and think.
The tools give us the ability to see different perspectives and help to work on ourselves not only personally but also in a team context and in a company context.

The best part of the experience was for me, the possibility of sitting together in the same room and speaking about ourselves. It gave us the possibility of getting to know each other, and learning from each other. I thought a lot about what my colleagues have told during the sessions we had and I tried to bring some of their perspective in my life.

I think it was an amazing experience that gave me a lot and that showed me how much I can grow and improve both personally and professionally, for myself and for the people around me.

People

Van Brigoli just joined TIQQE!

  • by Alicia Hed

We’re very happy to welcome Van Brigoli to our growing family at TIQQE. 

A full-stack developer experienced in developing softwares and web applications. Van has been exposed to working with various technologies such as  ReactJS, AngularJS, and Angular. He also has experience with Express, NestJS, Python, and Java in developing backends, while using NO SQL like MongoDB, and Relational Database like Postgresql. 

When he doesn’t work, he spends quality time with his family, or he might be seen playing online and mobile games like Dota 2 and Black Desert Mobile.

Van is a part of our team for PostNord – Common Solutions.

Welcome Van!

People

One-year anniversary at TIQQE:

Late last week it hit me that I’ve been part of TIQQE for over a year.
In this blog I would like to share some of my experiences from the previous year. 

I started in November 2019, I was excited, filled with energy, many ideas of what we could do and to be honest I was nervous and at times I still am.

It started great, it was a booming market, we have great company with fantastic employees and customers, and I spent most of my days spending time with them. 

We have always said we want to build something different – We want TIQQE to be something else.

We kicked off 2020 by setting the strategy ahead and didn’t want this to be set within a small group of people, so we opened this up to the entire company and workshopped together from our set vision and mission. Together we defined what was important for everyone and then together set a plan and started to execute. The result was outstanding, I was blown away by the amount of great ideas and the involvement by everyone and what pleased me the most was that we did this together.

Then just around the corner the pandemic hit, we saw a rapid change in the market and understood that we needed to act quickly. We needed to take control of what we could internally and then focus on sales externally and adapt to the market. We set a plan in place and started to execute, somethings worked and of course many didn’t.

We had one rule during the pandemic, we don’t let anyone go and stick together. Whatever it takes and make sure to always find a way, to ensure our peoples safety. 

I’ve personally made many mistakes in the past year, everything from saying the wrong thing, making wrong decisions and feeling of course I could have handled certain situations better. At the same time, it’s been very fun, at times it’s been challenging, very developing and I’m extremely thankful to have the possibility to work with people who are kind, understanding, helpful and out-standing within what they do.

My key take aways from my first year are:

  • You don’t need to have all the answers
  • The more questions you ask the more you learn 
  • Reflect, reflect, reflect
  • Don’t be afraid to say I don’t know
  • Don’t see employees and customers – See individuals
  • Most importantly always be nice
People

Anthony Mondoy just joined TIQQE!

We’re very happy to welcome Anthony Mondoy to our growing family at TIQQE. 

A software developer experienced in developing web applications. He has some great experience working with Python Frameworks like Flask and Django along with ReactJS and Go.
He enjoys working more on backend processes and producing efficient programs. He also has extensive experience working on Relational Databases like MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
When he is not coding, you will find him freediving, enjoying crossfit, or surfing in Siargao – a beautiful island in the Philippines!

Anthony is joining our SRE-team.

Welcome Anthony!

People

Maria Gantuangco just joined TIQQE!

We’re very happy to welcome Maria Gantuangco to our growing family at TIQQE. 

Maria is a proactive and results-driven test engineer with a strong knowledge of the whole software QA processes, methodologies and tools. She has an extensive working experience both in manual and automated testing. She is a true team player and she always ensures that the delivered product is of the highest quality. Professionally Maria enjoys learning new software technologies and also keeping up with current trends.
When she’s not testing, she’s spending her time as a full-time mother – shopping for baby items, doing laundry and basically doing the whole nine yards.

Maria is a part of our delivery team at PostNord.

Welcome Maria!

People

Lito Talaba just joined TIQQE!

We’re very happy to welcome Lito Talaba to our continuously growing family at TIQQE. 

Lito has his background in application development, developing web applications and software solutions. He has a great experience from working with Java, JEE and Spring. He has worked with multiple teams and he’s a dedicated software developer.
In his spare time he enjoys drawing and painting, playing instruments and meeting up with friends and colleagues to play video games.

Lito will be a part of our delivery team to PostNord.

Welcome Lito!

Tiqqe People

Working at TIQQE from another time zone

Jobeth Tampus is the first who joined TIQQE from Cebu in the Philippines, when TIQQE was just 1 month old. She is a senior fullstack developer with tons of experience and very appreciated by both her peers and customers, a superstar. Jobeth shares her own experience in this blog post.

When I first started out with TIQQE last June 2018, the company TIQQE was just starting out. I was excited to work with a new company! The onboarding was swift and David Borgenvik was the one who interviewed me. During the first meet-and-greet session, we discussed what my role was, what was expected from me and what I expected from them.

I got introduced to the people I was going to work with and got the overview of the project. David was so welcoming that I looked forward to work with him. In the next sessions, we had a technical dive into the code repositories we would be working with. We did pair-programming sessions. There, I got to peek into the code and I got a better understanding while David discussed the tasks. Then, he left me some small tasks so that I could explore the code on my own.

Experience, indeed, is the best teacher. It is faster to learn and absorb new stuff when you start interacting with it. And, being able to contribute to the project so soon and get feedback felt good! Easing into the new role was smooth.

Time flew. Two years has passed and TIQQE has grown so fast! There’s a lot of us now – some are here in Cebu, some in Sweden and a few in Italy.

But, the distance and time zone is negligible. It never felt that we are separate at all. Everybody’s so nice and approachable. We’re all just a chat or video call away! At work, we have tools that we use to collaborate on the code so we can still pair-program despite the distance. As an agile team, we have daily calls to do our stand ups. Other times, we just chat and have lively discussions online. With so many tools at hand, communication and collaboration is not an issue.

TIQQE is filled with such nice, warm people where there’s a culture of support, appreciation and feedback. We are able to raise our concerns and have healthy, respectful discussions in our work. We have a culture of learning and growing so we don’t stagnate in our jobs, and we have passionate people at work. So, it’s always fun and challenging everyday, and I never felt out of place.

Thanks for sharing Jobeth!

Tiqqe People

Who is Claude Shannon?

Claude Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer and cryptographer known as the “father of information theory”. He was born in 1916 and died in 2001. During his lifetime, he managed to invent several break throughs and the digital revolution started with him. He deserves wider recognition and that’s why we dedicate this blog post to his memory.

He’s one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with him.

Neil Sloan, AT&T Fellow

Claude Shannon lived in the same era as Alan Turing who is widely known as the man who broke the German Enigma code during WW2. The two met in the early 1940’s in Washington sharing ideas which complemented each others research.

Shannon began his graduate studies in 1936 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During his time at MIT, he invented switching circuits based on Boolean algebra. Boolean algebra was first introduced by George Boole in 1847 and is the basic concept of digital communication, “1s and 0s”. Switching circuits is the fundamental concept that underlies all electronic digital computers today. The work was documented in his master’s degree thesis “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” which was published in 1937. The master thesis earned him the Alfred Nobel American Institute of American Engineers award in 1940 and was considered the most famous master thesis of the century.

In 1948, Shannon published another paper – “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. In this paper he defined the subject of information theory and proposed a linear schematic model of a communication system, which was a new idea. Communication was then thought of as requiring electromagnetic waves to be sent down a wire. The idea that one could transmit pictures, words, sounds etc. by sending a stream of 1s and 0s down a wire. Shannon introduced the word “bit” for the first time.

Shannon was also a pioneer within artificial intelligence and machine learning. In 1950, he published a groundbreaking paper on computer chess which led to the first full game played by the Los Alamos MANIAC computer in 1956. The same 1950, he created the electronic mouse “Theseus” which could solve maze problems. It was a magnetic mouse controlled by a relay circuit that enabled it to move around a maze of 25 squares and finally learn the way out of the maze.

The maze configuration was flexible and it could be modified at will. The mouse was designed to search through the corridors until it found the target. Having traveled through the maze, the mouse would then be placed anywhere it had been before and because of its prior experience it could go directly to the target. If placed in unfamiliar territory, it was programmed to search until it reached a known location and then it would proceed to the target, adding the new knowledge to its memory thus learning. Shannon’s mouse appears to have been the first learning device of its kind.

According to Neil Sloane, an AT&T Fellow who co-edited Shannon’s large collection of papers in 1993, the perspective introduced by Shannon’s communication theory (now called information theory) is the foundation of the digital revolution, and every device containing a microprocessor or microcontroller is a conceptual descendant of Shannon’s publication in 1948.

There are a lot of interesting information about Claude Shannon on the Internet. Here’s a few sources you might want to explore. Enjoy!

Wikipedia

History-Computer

Theseus – the artificial intelligent mouse (YouTube)

People

Christoffer Pozeus is joining TIQQE

We’re proud to welcome Christoffer Pozeus to TIQQE. Christoffer is a cloud infrastructure architect who just recently passed the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification. How is it to join TIQQE as an attractive talent in the IT industry? What are the first impressions? Why TIQQE? We asked Christoffer to document his experiences in a series of vlogs.

Christoffer is passionate about technology and has been digging into the art of designing and building fault tolerant, self-healing, elastic and highly available systems on AWS for several years. He’s been working with some of the major automotive companies the past years and set up enterprise class architecture for autonomous driving initiatives.

We asked Christoffer to document his recruitment process in his own words to catch the essence in why talented people prefer TIQQE compared to other opportunities. We will follow Christoffer from the initial recruitment to the onboarding with TIQQE and his first assignment in a series of vlogs so stay tuned!

Thanks Christoffer for the feedback!

vlog #1 – Christoffer shares his reflections of the recruitment process
Tiqqe People

TIQQE People – Why TIQQE

  • by Anna Klang

How do you compete in the modern age for talent? Jacob Welsh shares his ideas of how TIQQE attracts the best talents and provide a superior customer experience.

Jacob Welsh, CEO