The Professor Gets Tenure

I firmly believe that the best learning happens outside the classroom. Over the past few years my work experiences have proved this to be true, particularly in the last year and a half with my internship at Packback. Today I’m excited to announce that I will be joining Packback full-time as a Software Engineer, starting December 14. In this new role, I will continue to do full-stack development on our various products and internal tools, tacking exciting new challenges and increasing the pace of work. Reaching this career milestone much earlier than I had planned, I had to make some adjustments - thus I will be transitioning to a part-time student at Illinois Tech for the remainder of my undergraduate studies, with an expected graduation date of Spring 2017. I’ve got to step up my game to succeed both in the workplace and school, but as very few people get this opportunity I am going to try to make the most of it.

I feel extremely lucky to have gotten involved with Packback, one of the most compelling EdTech startups out there. My relationship with the company started in March of last year, when I was looking for summer internships. However, I almost passed the company on my first encounter, failing to realize how I was to apply for an internship there. A few days after I had indicated my initial interest through a site called AngelList, I got an email asking if I wanted to hear more about their contract to full-time position, which confused me because I was looking for an internship. Little did I know that I would eventually become full time. After getting things sorted out, I was able to come into the office and meet the team. A few weeks and lines of code later, I had an offer for an internship. What happened in that relatively short span is even more unlikely considering the majority of startups I looked at either did not have an interesting mission or did not have jobs which fit my skill set. But somehow I was able to avoid going back to the corporate IT world, so it was off to the races.

I learned so much the summer of 2014. Not just software-wise, either; I gained as much non-technical as I did technical knowledge. Compared to my first startup job back in sophomore year of high school, I learned exponentially more here and am in a better position to make use of all the resources available. My learning continued into the 2014-15 school year, and accelerated again during this past summer. I don’t want this to turn into a long essay, so I’ll have to cover some lessons I learned in future posts.

Despite not being able to cover all the lessons in a single post, I can talk about the amazing team that helped me learn those lessons. The Packback team is incredibly generous. Here’s a select few that I have worked with since I joined:

• Founders
  • Mike: The CEO of Packback who has spent years cultivating deals with some of the largest publishers and impressive investors. He’s taught me lots about sales, pitching, fundraising, and whatever other business topics I happened to be curious about. He knows how to hustle in more ways than one.
  • Kasey: Our incredibly smart COO/President who is a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve learned a lot from him when it comes to marketing, product management, sales, and startups in general. He can pick up new skills quickly and has built an impressive network of advisors to help him as new challenges arise.
  • Jess: Packback’s very cheerful Head of Design who makes the brand come to life through great design and makes students happy with smooth user experiences. Very generous - always asking if she can do anything to help me with my projects. She also makes some cool illustrations for an upcoming comic book.
• Engineering Team
  • Karl: Packback’s first engineer and current engineering manager, who has been very adaptable as we transitioned from our MVP platform to Packback 2.0, and now into launching Packback Answers. Seeing how he has managed the engineering team and interacted with the non-technical side of the business has been a great example for me. I’m excited to have him as our engineering leader. On the side, he works on JobBrander and just finished the Chicago Marathon this past weekend.
  • Steven: An incredible software architect and team leader, he was the head of engineering from when I started my internship in May until January 2015. I got the privilege of learning all about software design patterns and domain-driven design from him, as well as seeing what processes were put in place to increase productivity and improve organization. His work put Packback on a solid technical foundation and made future growth much easier. These days Steven is contributing to open source and advising startups.
  • Sam: As our backend expert, Sam has helped us push Laravel to its limits. She is another great software architect and has led us in building a stable platform with a microservice architecture, which I’m very excited to have learned about and practiced. We are a much more flexible team because of this, and now she is spreading the PHP microservice gospel at various conferences and meetups, including the national Laracon Laravel conference this summer. Besides wrangling code she is an avid Game of Thrones fan, among other TV series.
  • Pete: Our frontend expert who has used the powers of JavaScript to make Jess’s user experience plan a reality. Since JavaScript acts much differently than PHP, it has been a privilege to learn the right way to do things from Pete. My code still needs some work, but I think once I have more time to contribute to the frontend I will learn a whole lot more. Apart from being our methodical frontend engineer, he’s an active swimmer and runner.
  • Brice: It’s very rare that you find someone with a strong frontend development background that also has a good eye for design. Brice happens to be that person. Although he’s now moved on to new adventures, when I was working with him this summer I learned a great deal about how to create clean and modular Sass. With his skills and Jess’s designs, PackbackBooks.com 2.0 looks awesome. Besides that, he’s extremely funny.

There are many more individuals that have helped make the company what it is today, from our investors to brand ambassadors to our rapidly growing sales team. I didn’t have the time to highlight them all, but I am looking forward to many more great experiences.

Going forward, there are going to be lots of new challenges I will face. Here’s just a few of the things I want to experience and learn in the months and years ahead:

• How to lead a development sprint
• New design patterns, and identifying where they would be useful in our infrastructure
• What it’s like to scale an engineering team from 3 to 6+
• How to identify opportunities that require little work but can yield big wins
• Scaling a new product from a few dozen users to tens of thousands
• How to grow and keep up with my professional network
• Making a meetup or conference presentation
• Conveying the results of these lessons in a clear and concise manner

My learning will continue in a classroom setting too. I’ll still be enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology, so I hope to take classes there that complement what I am learning on the job. I will be taking 6 credit hours (2 classes) per semester starting Spring 2016, so I plan to graduate at the end of Spring 2017. One of the things I will be continuing to practice is how to manage work and school simultaneously, which is going to be more difficult now that I am in the office 9-5 every weekday.

This career advancement will also have an effect on my various projects, something I plan to detail in a subsequent post. You can expect my activity in them to be significantly reduced so I can focus on making the most of the significant opportunities I have.

There’s been a lot leading up to this, so thank you to those who helped me get to this point. A lot of hard work and some luck brought me here, so I will do my best to keep it up.

— Eric “The Professor” Tendian

Software Engineer, Packback