How Android Engineers Grow Along With the Team at Dashlane

At Dashlane, the Android team is growing quickly. As the business expands, the projects and codebase are also increasing at an incredible speed. In the past two years, the team has grown from two engineers to eight and we’ve added an additional office. It is exciting to be part of a fast-growing company and a rapidly expanding team, and the opportunities for personal growth and professional development are many. 

Android engineers are encouraged to keep track of the latest technology in the Android community. Right after the official announcement from Google, the team added Kotlin into the codebase, and soon after started to experiment with Coroutines to facilitate asynchronous programming. Currently we have all the new code written in Kotlin using Coroutines, and we migrate legacy code as needed. 

One benefit of the modularization of projects is that team members can easily experiment with new ideas in a limited scope of the codebase. By presenting to team members and discussing feedbacks and ideas, the entire team learns. When we reach consensus, we then replicate the technology to other parts of the project.

Writing blog posts can help engineers to go deeper on a particular subject. The author needs to search for documentation, understand the topic deeply, improve the solution, and practice writing skills. 

Continuous learning is an important component of the culture at Dashlane, and it is vital to the health and growth of our engineering team. One of the best ways this is put into practice is sending engineers to Meetups and conferences, where we are encouraged to speak as well. These events present wonderful opportunities to: 

Dashlane engineers will be speaking at AndroidMakers, Paris Android User Group, and Droidcon Lisbon. We expect to continue doing more in the future.

Remote Control Your Application by Stan Kocken, Dashlane FR

Stockage et Partage Sécurisé de Fichiers Volumineux by Jonathan Salamon, Dashlane FR

State Restoration - The full Picture (With Coroutines) by Martin Devillers, Dashlane EN

As the team grows with more team members and more diverse projects, it becomes more important to invest in communication and collaboration. On the Android team, although engineers are working on different mission teams and different initiatives, we actively maintain a culture of transparency.

We have weekly platform meetings to meet and talk about what’s happening across different projects. When there are architecture changes, engineers are encouraged to create documentation and prototype to demonstrate to others, and facilitate detailed technical discussions.

Engineers are usually interested in expanding their knowledge into new areas. On the Android team, engineers work on a large variety of initiatives. To keep motivating engineers, there are a lot of projects such as building features for Dashlane’s business product, features for the consumer product, continuous integration, performance, cryptography, and cross-platform initiative—all of which allow us to continually gain new knowledge and experience. We take everyone's interest and motivation seriously. Team members are encouraged to discuss and choose topics that they are interested in working on.

Company-wide, we also host hackathon days that allow engineers to work on any projects they are interested in, with the opportunity to work with people from different departments.

Dashlane recognizes that engineers are a critical asset. From working on diverse projects, to attending conferences, to participating in company hackathons, the company takes many steps to invest in our professional development and continuous personal growth.

Xiaoyi Li

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