What does your role involve?
As the Mahara Project Tech Lead, I use my knowledge to ensure the Mahara ePortfolio system's codebase is of a high standard. To maintain this standard, I make sure the code is:
- Compliant with coding guidelines.
- Robust with security checks.
- Up-to-date with current trends and practices.
I liaise with members of the community and my developer team to decide what new features and changes we should make to improve Mahara. To stay fresh and relevant, this also includes reliability, user requirements, and user experience of Mahara.
I started as a Mahara developer in 2013 and have been the Tech Lead since 2016. My career journey has allowed me to learn and embed best practices into both the Mahara codebase and my normal workday.
What does your typical day look like?
My typical work day begins by checking overnight emails from clients and community members based in Europe and North America. Then, I'll investigate any issues they may have and reply based on my findings.
From here, I tend to continue working on development projects for the next release as part of the yearly release cycle. I also check in on the developers to see how their project work is coming along and if they need guidance or help.
Depending on my workload, I will try to do code reviews and test patches created by the developers and answer forum questions from the community. Some days, I will be helping Kristina, the Project Lead, with quoting for new project work.
Usually, I finish up dealing with issues that come in from local clients throughout the day.
Tell us about a recent problem you helped solve.
A large part of my job is to solve issues and fix problems. Normally, this is straightforward, as new problems occur when new code is added to the codebase. But a recent issue that stands out was a new change that conflicted with some old code. The new change was minor, had passed code review, and was considered safe. So the conflict was unexpected and ended up causing a security issue when doing a bulk activity in Mahara.
It wasn't obvious how the change caused the problem by looking at the code directly. But, I was finally able to track down the cause through iteration testing. By fixing this issue, I was able to make the codebase safer for all to use.
What do you enjoy about working at Catalyst?
I like working for Catalyst because of their philosophy of community. Catalyst shows these values through open source, community-maintained software and its willingness to upstream fixes back to the open source community. Also, I enjoy the community within Catalyst itself, where the people are willing to help each other by sharing their ideas and expertise to ensure work is interesting and done to a high standard.