Real Talk with Leighton Wallace
Meet Leighton Wallace, Software Engineer at Lever and member of /dev/color.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Education: Stanford University
A Quote to Live by: “The more you know the more you know how little you know.”
Connect with Leighton: on his LinkedIn
Tell us a bit about your early years.
I grew up in in Mission Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles. My parents are both teachers and were able to instill a thirst for knowledge that has helped me in school and in work. After my dad taught me to use MS-DOS commands to run games on our Tandy 1000, that thirst was applied to anything related to a computer.
How did you get started in software?
I took a CS course in High School, but the teacher was bad, I hated it, and vowed to never write software again. Then I studied Symbolic Systems in college and was exposed to the beauty and creativity involved in writing good code. My first software job was as an intern at Pinger, Inc. After building a feature that allowed users to post flash voice message widgets on their friends’ MySpace walls over the phone for my internship, I was hired full time and hooked on the feeling of building something out of nothing.
What are you focusing most of your time on now?
Besides planning for my wedding in July, I work on software that connects human potential to meaningful work at Lever. After years working on free consumer products, I appreciate being able to spend my energy helping to solve serious problems.
What is the most interesting technical challenge you’ve worked on recently?
I recently worked on a project to address performance of our application at Lever. We wanted to address our in-page performance, so I put in place a way to measure “jank” (the amount of time our users wait for our interface to render). With the measurement in place, I was able to prove that the subsequent performance updates I made actually worked.
Please state 2–3 of your current career goals? Why are these important to you?
I am the “Editor in Chief” for the Lever engineering blog (fulcrum.lever.co), one of my goals is to get every Lever engineer’s voice represented on the blog and for the content to demonstrably help us hire more engineers. This is important to me because I believe the human ability to communicate ideas is our most valuable ability. To that end I’d like to create a voice for Lever’s engineering team to contribute to the conversation about engineering as a craft, and to develop personal brand centered around writing beautiful code to solve important problems. Another goal of mine is to drive usage of Affiance — a node module I built that manages git hooks for a repository — at Lever and beyond. Short term, I’d like to get full adoption on the Lever team and prove that it has helped us avoid writing costly bugs. A long term goal would be to use Affiance as the basis for a conference talk about using tools to help maintain code quality and reduce bugs across a team.
Give an example of a recent time you’ve helped a fellow engineer. What lessons can be taken from their situation?
I recently helped a recently hired engineer put together his first features for Lever on our job site settings page. While certainly skilled and experienced, he still needed some help understanding Lever’s specific idioms and patterns for building software. We assign a specific engineering buddy to each new engineer for this very reason. He could have figured it all out eventually on his own, but one hour of pairing with me saved him many more hours of investigation and helped him feel successful more quickly.
In what areas can /dev/color members reach out to you for help?
I have worked as an individual contributor for 10+ years building medium to large scale web applications in both Ruby on Rails and Node. I know how to design, scope, and carry out large scale projects and would be happy to share any advice with respect to how to run projects, manage time, and consider how to break up work into manageable pieces. I also work at a company with a developed Diversity & Inclusion program. I can connect you to Lever’s head of D&I if you’d like to chat, and I can also help out with resources if you want to build your own D&I related initiatives. Finally, I have a pretty good network that I would be happy to leverage to help out other members of /dev/color.
As a member of /dev/color you are also committed to developing yourself. Can you share some areas you are looking to improve?
I am looking to improve my ability to create organization change. I want to get better at getting other engineers to “eat their vegetables”. I am also looking to improve my public speaking ability, especially when it comes to talking about technical subjects.
Can you speak about any passions outside of programming?
When I’m not tickling a keyboard, I like to salsa dance, climb walls, play video games, and make LED art. Ok, that last one involves programming, but it also involves soldering and building structures! I’m also quite passionate about music. I’m not a true musician or anything, but I can whip up a playlist to match the current situation like nobody’s business.
Why is being a part of an organization like /dev/color important to you?
Being in /dev/color is important because while an individual’s impact is limited, we have yet to find the limit to what groups of like-minded people can accomplish. I appreciate the strength of the network and the extra oomph it gives to accomplishing the mission of making every black engineer successful. Finally, I want to contribute to the infrastructure of black success now that I have the opportunities that most of my ancestors were denied because of their race.
Anything else you’d like to say/express?
In this day and age, organizations like /dev/color are more important than ever. Those that represent the ugly and divisive parts of America’s history are back in power; so we need organizations with hopeful and connected missions to continue the work of the beautiful and inclusive parts of America.
/dev/color is a non-profit organization who’s mission is to maximize the impact of Black software engineers. We create environments where Black software engineers can learn from one another and hold one another accountable for reaching ambitious career goals. To learn more, check out our website and follow our blog & twitter account.
