Henoch @ Iiwwa
Henoch was an incredibly smart engineer. He has a smile that brightened the room and he was generous both in spirit and action. I remember that when one of the interns had difficulty finding housing, Henoch did not hesitate to host him on his couch for the duration of the internship. He built many tools that the team continues to use to this day.
Here is a portfolio of his work:
Both are screens of our metrics dashboard that keeps track of some of our most important company metrics. He rebuilt this dashboard from scratch and built functionality that allows us to change the time horizons over which these metrics are showing with ease.
He built some of the internal mechanisms by which our marketing campaigns can stay in sync across multiple e-mail providers. This helped us make sure that we’re sending e-mails to the right people and that we never accidentally send an e-mail to someone who unsubscribed from one of our email providers.
He built a few tools that allow us to edit customer information easily and directly through our admin systems. In the past, this was a cumbersome process that took a lot of time from our customer service teams.
He wrote a wiki page that helps new developers get started with their work much more quickly. To date, 3 developers have used this page to get ramped up quickly on their work.
Those are only some of his contributions. In all he made more than 80 significant changes to our code base, each of which is permanently recorded in our systems.
At the beginning of his internship, I asked him to outline what were his learning objectives, he spelled out the following (those are his words):
I want to fully understand the code not just from an individual perspective of what each code does but how the framework ties to the fully working ecosystem and be able to understand enough to create my own web app.
I want to be able to add a substantial amount of code, enough that it can be distinguishable from past code so to be able to see a noticeable difference for the company by my actions.
I want to ensure that I’ve become confident with all aspects of using terminal in regards to connecting with a VM and interacting with it (creating executables, changing permissions, etc.).
I want to understand and be able to watch the process a lender takes in ensuring a loan is good and be able to notice patterns between companies that end up being successful as they receive loans.
I want to ensure that I practice my Arabic and am able to have some standard conversation by the end of my internship.
By the end of his internship, he managed to accomplish all of them. He was even speaking rudimentary Arabic in both Egyptian and Jordanian dialects. I have never seen someone pick up a new language this quickly on his own.