I’ve spent the last year in a specialized group within Accenture building software for various clients. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work on such cool projects. I started during the pandemic, all remote, at The Forge. The Forge referred to a network of employees that previously worked for a startup called Pillar Technologies. Pillar was acquired by Accenture a few years before the pandemic and didn’t hold up too well during the pandemic.
Aside from organizational in cohesiveness, I’m incredibly grateful for the time I spent at Accenture. I worked on two projects during my time; a smart city data platform and a Salesforce healthcare solution for a large retailer.
I am at more liberty to talk openly about the first project I worked on, mostly since the project was pretty public and the code is open source. The city of Columbus was awarded a grant and had many sponsors support their goal of making Columbus a smart city. You can find more information at their website below.
One of their projects, also known as SmartColumbusOS, was developed by Pillar prior to the acquisition. I joined the project as a Software Artisan to help their team scale their Kubernetes solution with helm, manage the Columbus’ K8s cluster and build full stack applications.
That’s a lot of stuff to learn and do in 9 months. Terraform. AWS. Helm. Kubernetes. Elixir. NodeJS. Github Actions. React. PrestoSQL. Kafka. Redis. Vault. It’s pretty safe to say that it was stressful yet extremely rewarding. Kubernetes is an amazing technology and I’ve personally really enjoyed working with the architecture.
The next project I was on I have much less I’m allowed to talk about but, again, in a very short time I learned a great deal. Salesforce. Apex. Omnistudio. Vlocity. OMS. Stripe. Salesforce Commerce Cloud. TruePill. Lots and lots of healthcare knowledge.
From a social perspective, consulting was, as expected, quite different than working at a R&D group at Motorola. People were definitely more put together, more business focused and less bleeding edge. I learned the value of how people perceive engineers and whether progress is being made. Technical solutions are hard, you get stuck in thought and your presentation generally suffers because of it. That is totally okay, but maybe not in front of clients or people you’re trying to “sell” to.
Have deep technical conversations in the appropriate meetings, and cater to the audience in your meetings. Stand Ups are used as a short update and to indicate any blockers to your work. Client meetings are to enable trust and provide concise and clear communication. Perception matters, whether or not you acknowledge it.
I also learned what it means to be a senior software engineer. It’s not that you’re a better programmer than everyone, which generally you are, but instead you know how to navigate the software teams and help facilitate that navigation. You help guide meetings, you help scope out work, you communicate with product, design, and business. You mentor and help people onboard.
Leadership is enabling people to succeed while encouraging them with kindness.
So many lessons.
Thank you, Accenture.
Hello, Indeed.