The new blog ‘Machines Talk, We Tech’ does feature much tech talk – particularly around the specific R&D challenges of going from startup to scale-up. However, there’s still enough room for the many different personalities to shine through.
All self-respecting tech companies need a tech blog. Welcome to the world of ‘Machines Talk, We Tech – Augury’s Tech (And Thoughts About Life)’. We talked with three of the contributors about what they hope to achieve with this new creative outlet centered on sharing innovation around machine health (and beyond).
Not Just Pretty Faces
Jeremie Zazoun is a backend developer – and also happens to already run a travel blog about Israel. When asked to describe his job in the least tech way possible, he obliges nicely: “I’m doing the stuff in the Cloud – where the data is brought together. It’s not about making it pretty for the screen, but it’s about what you end up seeing on the screen.”
“I do the pretty stuff,” jokes Lior Paz who is a senior frontend developer at Augury – as well as accomplished musician and aspiring restauranteur. “While Jeremie writes the stuff in the Cloud, I write the stuff that runs on the browser in your computer – stuff like the user interface and the way people get information and enter information.” Lior has been working at the company from almost the beginning. “It’s been a really nice thing to see it grow from four people to the 300 or whatever-gazillion we have now.”
Hila Fox is a software architect – and a bit of a rock star in the Israeli tech community. “I’m on the AI side. We’re responsible for getting any relevant detections to the customers: connecting all the dots between all the info coming in.”
Welcome To Our World
According to Hila the motivation behind the blog was simple: “We wanted an R&D blog because we wanted to write the content we actually wanted to read. We’re very strong from an engineering perspective so that’s worth sharing. Also, I am proud of my colleagues and I like to see them shine.”
“This blog is a lot about sharing,” Jeremie adds. “We wanted to give back to the tech community by sharing what we learn at Augury.”
It was also important to involve the whole R&D team. “We didn’t want one person writing. We wanted everyone to write their own stories under their own name and in their own way,” says Hila. “It’s not just about building the Augury brand, but building personal brands. Win-win.”
The first step was to recruit people from every R&D discipline represented within Augury and bring them together for a writing workshop. “Then we told them to write whatever they wanted – and they did,” smiles Lior.
Diversity As Understatement
The resulting content is indeed diverse. It covers everything from how using the microservices mindset for MVP can help you avoid technical debt to transforming your hardware through Agile to how Augury data science can potentially improve radar tracking. “The blog really represents our culture well,” says Hila. “One reason for this is that the whole project was pushed forward and backed by our VP of R&D Lior Leiba. He gave us extra motivation.”
The blog also fits nicely into the larger tech blog scene. “Any company with any visibility has a tech blog,” says Lior Piaz. “We read them and use them to learn new things, to compare ideas, to quickly see what a company and its culture is all about. It’s all about communication – the most important thing there is.”
The Augury blog also brings something special to the table, according to Jeremie. “Most company tech blogs have very strict guidelines. We don’t. Everybody writes about things they really believe in. One post can cover something incredibly technical and another might be about how to optimize your own workstation.”
Hila agrees. “I think it reflects the company: it’s about being authentic, not generic. And letting the people who make the technical decisions in the company be heard.”
“Not a lot of companies are in this unique position. It’s natural for people to wonder: How the hell are they doing that?”
The Technologies Of Scale
“Being a machine health company is not the only thing that makes us different, it’s also the stage we’re now in,” says Lior. “We were a startup and now we’re a scale-up in a huge transition. Not a lot of companies are in this unique position. It’s natural for people to wonder: How the hell are they doing that? So, this is a way of us sharing our knowledge – the successes and the failures.”
Indeed, as much as the internet is flooded with information for startups, it lacks for scale-ups. “If you search for technical stuff, you find lots of ‘first mile’ stuff but if you dig deeper: no one is writing about it. I don’t need another tutorial on how to write ‘Hello World’ in C++,” notes Lior dryly.
Changing Engines While Driving Down The Highway
Now the team is gearing up for a fresh round of posts. Jeremie wants to write about the hiring process. “Every company has a different view on this. At Augury, we have a strong company culture which leads us to do things differently. I think we have something new to bring to the table.”
Hila would like to build out a series of posts that would formalize architecture guidelines when building for scale – “and the work, discussions, feedback and iterations that go into that. “It’s not an architect’s job to make the decisions but to create guidelines. And the better it’s defined, the easier it is for everyone else internally. But we’d also like to share our learnings externally.”
Meanwhile, Lior wants to write about how you can make technological leaps in a continual way: “Not just stopping at one point every half year – killing the flow – and then continuing after that. Something along the lines of: How can we switch a car engine while it’s still driving?”
Stay tuned…
Follow all the latest Augury tech blogs at Machines Talk, We Tech.
