Today’s Tech Role Model is Brook Shelley. Brook lives in Emeryville, CA, with her cat, Snorri, and works for Slack. Her writing has appeared in Queer Quarrels, The Toast, Lean Out, Transfigure, and the Oregon Journal of the Humanities. She speaks at conferences on queer and trans issues, and is chair of the board of Basic Rights Oregon. She loves reading, traveling, and eating bacon. Currently, she works as a Senior Partner Engineer for Slack, a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services.
Senior Partner Engineer since October—Senior Developer Relations Engineer before that.
I love helping other engineers and developers build cool stuff, answer hard questions, and make a platform better.
My day usually starts at around 8 am, when I make breakfast and catch the bus across the bay to work. I try to have my first meetings at 9:30 am so I have some time to settle, and spend the bus ride catching up on email or reading a book. Between meetings about projects, or talking to partners, and working on documentation or answering partner messages my mornings go by quickly. Lunch is around noon, and I often eat with coworkers or teammates but try to talk about non-work stuff. I usually have a few big projects in flight at once, so status meetings and coordination with our business and engineering groups is a big part of my week.
Project management and time management are huge in my role, and every role I’ve had. Overall priorities get set by leadership, but it’s my responsibility to determine how I accomplish them. Knowing how to collaborate, and also when to enter Do Not Disturb and write or work on a project is important. Technology-wise, I use Slack a lot for work, as well as Javascript, Markdown, Atom (my IDE), and api.slack.com.
When I’m solving a challenge for a partner, or testing a new API feature, I often get to make a silly bot. I recently made one that responds as my cat to various queries to test some our Conversation and Events API.
Getting to the heart of the question. Often when partners ask about Slack API features, or integrations, it’s vital to get to the layers of questions, and help steer them towards their goals. Knowing best practices, and having a quick-recall of various capabilities is a must.
My team works with our business development group, engineering, and many other teams. Since we help partners integrate with and build on Slack’s Platform, we talk to most of the company at some point.
I started recently at Slack, so my next few months is still settling-in, and learning how best to fit in to an incredible, growing company. In the future, I’d love to move further into leadership, or mentor more engineers.
Partner Engineering rewards folks who can think on their feet, communicate clearly, organize themselves, and work with many groups at once. Someone who enjoys a shifting role, and shaping the future of partner applications and of a platform would be a great fit. I think DevRel and Partner Engineering are also great fits for tinkerers and puzzle-solvers. Personally I find it helpful to know memes, and have favorite emoji.
My communication skills have gotten even better due to this work, and so has my bravery at speaking up when I know something. Folks depending on me for answers means I need to be confident, but also know when to say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” and “I was wrong”. I’m much better at building bots now than when I started off, and I’ve gotten even better talking in front of a crowd as well.
More than 155,000 weekly active developers build for Slack Platform, more than 8.8 million apps have been installed and 90 percent of paid teams use apps. Success for me is seeing those numbers grow, and ensuring the apps our partners build are helpful, fun, and amazing.
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