Tell us about yourself and what you do at Pinata!
I’m Fernando and I am the leader of Pinata’s Support Pod! I’m based in Buenos Aires, Argentina and I have two wonderful kids - Tomás (8) and Francisco (13). In my spare time, I love to play guitar and occasionally enjoy some video games.
As the leader of our support pod, I work closely with our Community team to fix bugs and problems that come up on Pinata’s platform. Our community team is more client-facing, interacting and communicating with our users directly and figuring out their issues. They create tickets and pass them on along to me, where I then take the issues our client is having and put them into technical terms for our engineers. After the bug is fixed, I follow up on the tickets to be sure that the fix was solved in the production environment before pushing the change live.
What has been your experience being a part of Pinata’s engineering team? Is there anything special about your team that you are particularly proud of?
My personal experience at Pinata has been really awesome. I started as a front-end developer and transitioned into working on the back-end. Now I am a full-stack developer, working on both the front and back-end of our platform, giving me a wide view of the systems and processes that we have at Pinata. I really enjoy helping solve problems that are helping creators build some incredible projects.
I am very proud of the teams that I am a part of and how we solve problems. From community to product to engineer, it kinda feels like we are like superheroes—helping people and trying to unlock their creativity and ability to solve problems.
What is it like being part of a fully-remote team? What advice do you have for other remote workers?
We have many team members in different time zones and cultures, which means we have different expectations and working styles as we’ve all come from different experiences. Our team members are all very open-minded and flexible, and we’re constantly pushing each other to be the best we can be. It’s all a learning experience.
My best piece of advice when it comes to working on a fully-remote team is to be patient and stay organized. You won’t get the immediate response you want unless you spend time setting up expectations and workflows, so take the time to create that foundation. And of course, always be prepared and get as comfortable and productive as you can with asynchronous work.
What are some of the most useful tools you have found while working in your role as a developer?
A tool that I have found to be incredibly useful recently has been Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a consultancy source to get information about common and uncommon errors. Sometimes, you can get information about different ways to solve a problem by finding issues or people that experience the same problems as you and asking the community for help.
In my day-by-day, I have come across a few errors that are not common and I found solutions or possible solutions there. Generally, after I check Stack Overflow, I go to the official documentation of the product that I'm dealing with to confirm if Stack Overflow answers make sense or not; and make decisions on how to solve our issue from there. There are many tools that I find useful in my role, but Stack Overflow is one I consistently use to help me improve every day!
What is something that you wish you knew early in your career as an engineer? And what is your best piece of advice for those looking to step into a role like yours?
There are two things I’d like to talk about - constantly developing new skills and keeping a great attitude.
First, a good developer must have knowledge and curiosity about different tools, approaches, platforms, and technologies. They always have to be hungry about learning new things, and they can’t be afraid of making a few mistakes along the way. Being able to have a wide scope of knowledge and constantly seeking out ways to learn new things is what sets great developers apart from good ones.
Second, it is critically important to have a great attitude when working on a team and be able to focus on helping people and being client-oriented. As a developer, we have to be aware of client needs because, at the end of the day, we’re working for them. We have to focus on the human aspect of our role every day, for our teams and for our customers.
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