Discuss Employee Spotlight – Dillon

The “Discuss Employee Spotlight” is a Q&A series dedicated to showcasing all of the amazing talent at Discuss.

For this month’s profile, we talked with Dillon Easter, one of our Senior Software Engineers, who joined the Discuss team in August of 2021 and is based in Seattle, Washington.

1. Tell our readers a little bit about your role at Discuss.
   As a Senior Software Developer on the Product Engineering team at Discuss, my role is all about delivering on our Product Roadmap goals by owning and implementing specific features. For me, what that looks like on a day to day is: investigating and building proof of concepts to determine if features are feasible, working with the Product team to hammer out the requirements, designing how the feature will look from a code perspective (what needs to be added, changed, etc.), getting feedback from the team, and then planning out and working on the specific implementation. While that’s a pretty high-level look at what we do, as you can imagine there are MANY pieces that go into each of these steps as well as work we constantly need to do just to keep things running smoothly. As we’re still a relatively small engineering team, a lot of us wear a lot of different hats–from maintaining infrastructure, to monitoring performance, to debugging issues with existing code, there is never a shortage of things to do!
   
2. Which of Discuss’ core values are most inspired by? (Empathize, Collaborate, Obsess, Out Innovate, Excel)
   It might surprise you that an Engineer would feel this way, but I think Empathize is the core value I’m most inspired by. Despite being pretty far removed from interacting with customers, the pieces of work I find the most interesting and fulfilling are the ones where I feel like we’re truly understanding a customer’s needs and making their experience on the platform a better one. Not to imply there’s work we do where the customer’s needs aren’t at the forefront, but I feel much more connected to the work knowing that what we’re doing makes a difference. I also think working primarily with computers and technology can potentially be a bit isolating, so being able to empathize with my team and the rest of my coworkers at Discuss is super important to me and drives me to make both the product and our work environment better for everyone.
   
3. Tell us about your mindset and approach in your role.
   The mindset I take to work at Discuss is one I adopted after my first opportunity working as an engineer. Coming to Discuss from this other job really made me want to bring the best version of myself because I was constantly second guessing myself and thinking I might not be smart enough, talented enough, or have enough technical experience to be great at what I do. From that moment I made a compromise with myself–I told myself that as long as I’m constantly challenging myself in my day to day work then it doesn’t matter whether I feel like I’m good enough or the “best” in my field. As long as I’m challenging myself then I’m learning and growing, and that’s really the best you can do. So from my first day, I wrote a sticky note and attached it to my monitor that just said “Have you challenged yourself today?” Seeing that sticky note every day always reminds me of how far I’ve come but also how far I want to go and I think it’s really guided me in the right direction with the work I’ve done here.
   
4. What project or initiative are you most proud of at Discuss?
   The initiative I’m most proud of (so far) has got to be our Approval Flow initiative. From the outside it seems like a very straightforward feature–Organization admins get notified when people request access to their Projects and we gate how many people are allowed based on the number of seats they’ve paid for in their Subscription. However, getting this feature implemented was such a major overhaul to how our system used to work that getting it done not only felt monumental, but it felt like a MASSIVE leap towards moving our platform fully into a Software as a Service (SAAS) model. After that initiative, it felt like the gates were really unlocked for users to start enjoying the benefits of an unlimited seat-based subscription model and I was really proud to be so heavily involved in such a monumental moment for the business.
   
5. What is something unique about you (a fun fact) that few people know about?
   One of the things most people wouldn’t know about me is that my bachelor’s degree is actually in Biology with a focus in Conservation, Evolution, and Ecology. While I hated biology in high school, when I went to college I got super inspired by just how much wonder and amazement there is in the natural world and I wanted to do my part to understand it in order to be the best steward I can be. I’m OBSESSED with nature documentaries and even have my own bug collection (probably the nerdiest thing about me). While I switched to tech shortly after graduating (working in a lonely forestry lab really did a number on me) I still carry that passion for understanding and connecting with nature and try to do my best to make sure I keep it alive no matter how deep into a computer I get.