Like many other engineers, sometimes Solutions Engineers need to add fixes or new features to the current repositories. That’s why at Belvo we also contribute to open source projects: to achieve customers’ goals while improving our abilities.
Solutions Engineers (SEs) at Belvo are in charge of identifying needs, understanding technical challenges, teaching API capabilities, and managing customer implementations to use Belvo’s solution.
As part of Belvo’s Customer Success team, they have the closest relationship with our client’s necessities while taking the best care of Belvo API. And as we are engineers too, we can also code, add features and fix issues for them.
“It’s the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
Sheryl Sandberg
By contributing to Belvo’s open source repositories, SEs can deliver better results for our customers and the company. And at the same time, this interaction can make the team’s life simpler and more enjoyable!
Why do we contribute to our repositories?
Simpler dependency management ⏰
There are almost no wait times when you’re the code owner. If you need to add features or fix an issue and have an idea of the solution, you can create a pull request and contribute to the change in an agile manner.
Growth opportunities 🚀
If a team member is planning to jump horizontally to be a Software Engineer, this is an excellent opportunity to start getting involved with the squad. Contributing to an unfamiliar project can allow you to build the team’s skills on different technology stacks. It’s also a way to make a broader impact at Belvo.
Visibility 📚
Adding features or fixes in our open-source repos can help you add more languages or activation to the SEs Github profile and help other engineers internally and worldwide. Indirectly, the team assists the product team in finding new versions of the solution we are approached by creating a PR.
Empathy 🙌
Solutions Engineers already have customer visibility; they understand their challenges and why customers are with us, but what about our Engineering team? Contributing to repositories can help SEs better understand our engineering methodology and the product code functionality. It can also show them how other departments see the product, and who knows, maybe improve our feature requests or issue tickets?
Fun & challenging 🤩
For some, coding as a side project helps maintain their inner developer skills updated and distress from their daily job (if the code works, of course).
What open source projects does Belvo have?
As of today, Belvo has four open-source repositories where you can contribute:
However, the team has the option to create other SDKs or projects from scratch so our customers can consume our API. We always get things done as that is part of our culture.
How does Belvo contribute to existing repos?
Along with internal policies for creating repositories, creating commits, and deploying new projects, code review is the primary engineering practice (a.k.a. Peer Reviews) we use to open the developer changes to other teammates so that they review our code and help us build software that guarantees quality, security and excellence. And if that isn’t enough to finish our contribution, the team can always ask their questions on the different slack channels.
