Manager Review

What has gone particularly well?

You hit the ground running and integrated with the team very quickly, being able to assist in the Pool Pass development cycle very early on. One month after joining us you were already an active participant of the Pool Pass development cycle, providing feedback to design / production and suggesting adjustments on small details on the feature, pushing for these improvements and implementing them. You also adapted to our way of working very quickly. You prepared and presented a sprint review without me pushing for it. This kind of autonomy is a very valuable trait to have in Miniclip, and I want to see more of it.

From your self assessment and AFPs:

“Being able to contribute to the Pool Pass release. Making a contribution to a big release this early is something I'm really proud of.”

“Rapidly integrated the team. Gonçalo is a team player and blended into the team almost immediately, an example of this was his eagerness to understand how work was done within the team, taking on tasks such as sprint reviews, board printing, asking people for mini-groomings regarding more complex systems within Pool Pass development without any hesitation.”

“I believe Gonçalo had a quick integration and adapted fast to the team. It is normal for Gonçalo to question the decision in order to understand the rational and that is something that shows the curiosity and the engagement that allow him to understand what he is doing and how that can improve the project. I see Gonçalo as a person proactive but also able to ask for help when needed. He communicates in an objective and clear way.”

“... He is a fast learner and grew very fast in terms of ownership and product knowledge since he joined us only a few months ago. ...”

Your technical skills and your drive to improve them are another very valuable asset for you as a developer. This was something that impressed me and your peers. You were able to handle and deliver not so simple features like the refactor of the table assets. You also took head on the challenge of looking into bumping the renderer to try and create better and prettier shaders and effects in Pool.

From your self assessment and AFPs:

“Bumping the Renderer so that I could write some shading code gave me a lot of insight into our codebase (and it was pretty fun). …”

“ .. on Operations his work on the table masks showed a large amount of knowledge and independence from this new joiner.”

“Gonçalo showed very keen technical knowledge and problem solving capabilities from early on. In his training task, he always tried to make sure he understood the problem to its core, which made the system more solid and sound.”

“Surprised me positively with his technical capacity, he shows to have the right skills for the job, especially with the tables on demand feature. ...”

I want to make an additional note on your openness to feedback as I believe it is also very important to reinforce, as it will help you grow from that feedback and create healthy working relationships.

From your self assessment and AFPs:

“I think I'm very open to criticism and feedback and that has helped me grow as a developer and as a team member.”

“Gonçalo is very attentive and takes ideas and criticism very well”

“All my interactions with Gonçalo were very positive, he easily understood the message I wanted to pass to him. I gave him feedback twice regarding issues with something he did on git and he reacted well to it, he didn’t use a defensive posture.”

What could’ve gone better?

During your introductory task there were situations in which you did not ask for help and instead spent hours fixing issues that would’ve been understood and fixed faster with the help of someone more experienced on the project. Obviously this is a double edged sword as it is important to always keep a healthy balance between the time we invest into solving something alone and not disturb other people’s focus or asking for help. Sometimes it’s better to have 2 people spend 15 minutes fixing an issue instead of having 1 person spending 4 hours. This is not something that I consider to be a problem right now, as I don’t see it happening but I felt that it was important to reinforce because it was mentioned on one of your AFPs.

There were some technical issues you had with merging branches, which some changes on submodules were reverted, you received feedback at that time and I did not see this happening anymore.

Both of these issues are very minor and I’m very happy to only have these to talk about.

For the future I will want you to have more ownership and responsibility in the project. I want you to be more vocal and to help push the team to grow technically.

What actions should be taken to develop?

I will give you more feature ownerships during this year which will help you grow. This will make you have to design the technical side of the features and negotiate with the whole team to achieve results faster and better.

You will also invest L&D time into reading books and working on specific projects related to your interests that are in line with the needs of the product, like the investment you did with MCRenderer.