Meet Amrita Ganpatlal, Tech Lead for the Stewardship Platform team

Author: Iskandar Suhaimi, Content writer, Tumelo

In this blog, we speak to Amrita Ganpatlal, Tech Lead at Tumelo, about her role and responsibilities. Read as she shares what a day in the life of a Tumelo engineer looks like.

Hi Amrita, please introduce yourself and what you do at Tumelo.

My name is Amrita, and I joined Tumelo in August 2021 as a software engineer. My background is in software development and right now I'm the Tech Lead for the Stewardship Platform team.

Could you describe what it's like to be in the team? What does the day-to-day or a typical week look like?

At the moment, there are four engineers in my team. At the start of our two-week sprints, we hold a sprint planning meeting to pick a number of tickets from our backlog and try to complete them before the sprint ends.

Within the sprint, we also do refinement sessions to prepare tickets for the following sprints.

Every day, the team meets at 10 am for a standup where we talk about how we're doing and if we're facing any blockers. We work on each of our tickets for the rest of the day, organising huddles, pairing up on certain tickets, or doing reviews.

For engineers reading this, we also deploy several times a day. The process goes like this:

• After an engineer works on a specific feature, they create a pull — or merge — request.

• Once a team member reviews and approves the request, it gets merged into the master branch.

• We then run frequent pipelines that will bring the request through a bunch of unit tests, integration tests, end to end tests, deploy on dev, and staging. Once all of those jobs succeed, the change is deployed to production.

The automated process means we can deploy multiple times a day.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

What I enjoy most about my role is getting high-level requirements from the Product teams or customers and trying to break that down into achievable chunks: getting more information; working out a solution; following through with the implementation from end to end.

Sometimes the process involves writing up Requests for Comments (RFCs), a document which you use to get people's feedback and guide you to implementing a solution in the best way.

But more than that, it's also about attempting to predict how a feature might evolve over time and leaving enough room for it be expanded.

More broadly, I find our 10-3 core working hours really useful because you can make your schedule work around you, as long as you do the work that's required of you.

"The flexibility is really useful when you have appointments and errands to run!"

 

What is the one thing you'd want someone joining Tumelo to know?

I think they should know how amazing our culture is. Each and every one of us lives by the company values — daring, nimble, mission-driven, empowered, supportive — in some shape or form.

There's a collaborative nature and everyone's really happy to help. It makes work really enjoyable and it means that on Sunday evenings, you don't have that anxious feeling of going back to work on Monday morning.

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This blog is part of a series that highlights the amazing people working in Tumelo. If you're interested in joining the team, check out our We're Hiring page.