Written by Michelle Wong - Marketing Specialist
We sat down for a chat with Darwin Dingel, one of our Developer Team Leaders who has been with the company since March 2022. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What are some of your interests and hobbies?
I enjoy playing lots of basketball. I have two kids, my son is nine and my daughter is five. Sometimes I play video games with the kids.
With the family, during summer we try to get out and go camping. We’re just starting to do some easy overnight hikes all together.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
I'm originally from the Philippines. After a couple of years of working, I moved to Malaysia for half a year, then I moved to Singapore for five years. After that my wife got a software testing job in New Zealand and we moved here. We’ve been in Christchurch for 11 years now.
You came to Comet with a lot of experience. What’s it like to change industries?
Prior to Comet, I worked on embedded systems – so mostly programming on chips, a more hardware-based application. I was in that field for about a decade and I was looking to do something different.
Sometimes it’s hard to make that change if you’ve been in one situation for a long time; people might think you are only an expert in that one area. Before I left my previous role, I was already studying other programming languages to be able to shift to another product.
What attracted you to work at Comet?
You can feel how human the company is. Sometimes when you're in a company, you know that you turn out work, but you don’t see the impact of that work. At Comet, there is the feeling that customers are not just an account number, they are actual people and businesses that we are trying to help. So, that's really refreshing for me.
What do you love about working at Comet?
I moved from a product where you can’t really see your work – you just see a device there with blinking lights. But with Comet, you can see the differences you’re making with the software and how that’s helping the IT professionals we work with.
I love how we prioritize the customer experience. It’s not, “How are we going to get more money out of this somewhere?” It’s more about, “How do we help the customers get the most out of our product” and actually helping people.
How would you describe the team culture at Comet?
It's really people centric, which is very refreshing. The people at Comet are really nice. When I first started, I was nervous because I was shifting to a new field. During your first week at Comet, you have pre-scheduled “get-to-know-you” catch-ups with lots of team members. Those informal chats were really nice and immediately helped put me at ease.
How would you describe the work-life balance?
As a father, I have to be a bit flexible because the kids’ schedules sometimes change. Comet is great about that. We’re allowed a lot of flexibility to prioritize family.
I also enjoy the mix of working two days a week remotely and a few days where you meet people in the office; it’s a good balance.
Can you tell us about how you became a Dev Team Lead?
I first started at Comet as a developer. I led the VMware project last year. Then an opportunity came up, Comet was growing and work was going to begin being divided between two dev teams. I was promoted to lead one of those teams.
How is work divided between the two dev teams?
Both teams work cross-functionally across the entire product. Some developers do have in-depth expertise in certain areas, but the goal is to cross-train the teams so we’re never overly reliant on a single person for one area.
Our developers work on multiple parts of the product, and because you get exposed to more parts of the system, you learn a lot really quickly.
What does your day-to-day usually look like?
As a Team Lead, I facilitate the Astro Dev team’s daily stand up meetings and one-on-ones with each of those developers. Each morning I look through our team’s project management board for progress updates, checking in on tasks that need attention and helping to unblock work. Then I run through any support tickets that have been escalated for dev work. After that I jump into my own development tasks.
What's your favorite part of being a team leader?
It’s exciting to be more across all areas and getting to know how things work. As a developer, you get assigned tasks and focus on that area until you’re finished with a project. As a Team Lead, I enjoy being exposed to other parts of code that I wouldn’t otherwise be asked to look at. I like having a high level understanding of what’s happening across the product, it’s really interesting.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a developer ?
Just get started, and keep learning. There are so many resources on the internet now, you can start learning anything you want on YouTube. Then there are open source tools, including many of the tools being used by developers in corporate, so you can get started really quickly.
You will fail at times, and the good thing about it is that you can start again, just keep going and keep learning.
