Hugh Hartigan
Engineering Lead
I had the privilege of being Cesar's mentor while he was an Apprentice at Twilio. During our time together, I was able to see both his technical and personal growth. He was an engaged participant on our team, getting to know everyone on a personal level and bringing a spark of liveliness to our meetings. He was active in all of our ceremonies, surfaced questions with stakeholders, and helped to institute the concept of a Culture Captain on our team, effectively a point person whose responsibility it is to foster team bonding, an idea we've since spread to our at-large team.
With regard to technical ability, Cesar is an ideal mix of self-sufficiency and a willingness to learn. He embraces the struggle to facilitate his own growth but is mindful of when he's out of his comfort zone and has no issue asking for help. His biggest task while at Twilio involved end-to-end feature work across several of our systems, from the API to a client-side application and a shared component library. In preparation for this work, he coordinated with stakeholders to gather requirements, communicated delays/blockers to the team, and facilitated the release and subsequent testing of his code changes across multiple realms. Exceeding expectations, he also converted an outdated piece of our API from JavaScript to TypeScript, something we expect from the rest of our team, and a task he was willing to take on, even though he was relatively unfamiliar with TypeScript at the time.
While we weren't able to hold onto Cesar as part of our team, any company would be lucky to have him, not only for his technical potential as he grows in his career but largely because of the immeasurable intangibles he brings by just being himself. Go get 'em, Cesar!
