My name is Carlos. I live in Sabadell, near Barcelona, and I've been working for Moodle
for almost 4 years. I am currently
a team lead for the European development team of Moodle LMS.
I joined Moodle
at the beginning of 2018 as a developer. Back then we used to work in pairs. I worked
with a peer in Perth. While working in pairs we worked on component maintenance
peer reviews, bugs, participating in forums, and then in each of the
releases we worked in teams to develop new functionalities. Teams
changed according to functionalities and release. On May 2019 there was a change of
structure in the development teams for Moodle LMS and three teams were created,
two with base in Perth and one based in Barcelona, and there's
where I was made Team Lead for the development team in Europe. Besides that,
since the beginning I have collaborated with the Partners team in the technical evaluation of
future partners. I help them review their plugins and see the technical competence
of the future Partner. And this is what I've been doing in these 4 years.
What does a day as a Team Lead look like?
I organise my week the week before. I have a look at what my next week will be like and
I plan it out, and then every day I plan for the next day, so that I start the day
knowing what I'm going to do. I start very early in the mornings, this is
a personal choice, and basically most of the meetings we have are in the mornings,
we try to group them as muchas possible so that the rest of the day is left for development work
Days are very varied for a team lead. Some days there's
development and many peer reviews, other days it's more about team management,
because it's important to be there for the team, giving them
the trust and space so that they feel comfortable to work, mostly working as a facilitator,
which means trying to remove any blockers, and be alert for any indicator
of any blockers, so that the team have no difficulties to do their job,
make sure they have the best conditions to work as well as possible. And then
other days I help the Partners team and participate in other meetings, whether
it is with other teams or other projects. As a Team Lead, I facilitate my team's meetings,
and in other meetings and projects from other teams, I take other roles.
and basically, it's being there for my team and promote trust in my team,
collaboration, transparency, communication...
that's the daily life of a Team Lead, lots of fun.
Who are your team members?
In my team we're 5 people. 4 of us live near Barcelona
and 1 lives in Russia, in Kaliningrad. We have 2 integrators
in the team, Sara and Ilya, then we have 2 analyst developers,
Amaia and Ferran, and then there's me to support all of them.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
We're currently working in improving the user experience in course creation
and in course navigation, and we're also working in the integration of
a new admin tool to make importing and exporting settings easier
and simplifying Moodle. We have removed a few plugins which were not up to date
and simplified the settings' options. This is what the team is focusing on now for Moodle 4.0.
Besides that, we maintain over 30 components within the team, where
we do the daily triage, peer review, prioritise bugs to fix comfortable those components,
participate in forums related to these components... that's what the team does.
As a remote team, how do you work and communicate?
About how we organise ourselves daily... Our key is to have close communication,
to support each other, trust each other and co-govern,
we try to share responsibility amongst all of us
and try to understand that we all go together. The team is very cohesive.
I'm very lucky in that I have an excellent team who generate a great atmosphere,
and are very motivated. [We have two] fix weekly meetings, on Mondays and
Thursdays, and then there's short, optional and functional meetings the rest of the days,
where people can decide to show up ro not. The key is that when we're in those meetings,
if we need a team member who's not in the meeting at the time, we can
message them and they'll show up immediately. We have as many face to face meetings as we need,
so keeping communication and transparency is essential to us,
as well as generating an atmosphere and space to let ideas flow in the team
which we can implement and which help us improve as a team.
How do you organise day-to-day work?
Basically, for all administrative tasks, I'll show you a Moodle course
that we're using for all things admin-related. Here you can see our
Moodle course for team management. We divide triage work weekly,
and whoever is in charge of triage has their photo here, this week it's Amaia. Here we basically
outline the week's priorities, and then we have many links that are important
to us, like meeting notes, or 'How we do things'. This is key especially for
new team members, so that they know how we work within the team,
which is something we have decided between all of us. We have direct links
that we need in a day-to-day basis, like project links or Jira filters
that we need in the Moodle Tracker, we have direct links to the components that
we're working on during the week, and then we have little things like...
we like having a space where we thank each other, which is not really necessary in this team
because there's already a great atmosphere and we thank each other daily, but
it's good to still acknowledge this. And this is how our team works.
What do you like the most about working at Moodle?
What I like the most about working in Moodle is the flexibility it gives me. The flexibility to
conciliate family life and work life is basic for me: I have two children and Moodle
allows me to take them to school every day, pick them up, take them to extra curricular activities,
take care of them if there's an emergency, be with them... In this time of school closures,
if they have to stay at home there's no problem, because I work from home, so it's
great to have this flexibility. And besides that, I love working in a global project
with a great community behind, which participates in education and plays their part to
try to improve education and provide educational tools a a global scale
and where there's honesty, transparency and respect.
So, what can I say? I am thrilled to be here.