At Perficient Latin America, we count ourselves lucky to have such a diverse and incredibly talented offshore software development workforce. Our employees cover an extensive range of specialties, capabilities, and technologies, but most importantly, display great qualities as people and citizens of the world.
Continuing our interview series, we want you to experience our employees’ stories and expertise, hearing their perceptions firsthand and learning more about what makes Perficient Latin America a great place to work.
A Seasoned Performance Engineering Expert’s Point of View
Carlos Zuluaga’s, Perficient Latin America Head of Performance Engineering, journey at Perficient Latin America has spanned several years. He has contributed greatly to Perficient Latin America comprehensive understanding of performance engineering. Over the past few years, the performance engineering teams contribution and enthusiasm have led to significant improvements for clients, including a systems performance improvement of 200% in 6 months and the creation of Perficient Latin America proprietary performance tool that turned days of data processing into mere minutes.
In this installment, Carlos talks about his experience working at Perficient Latin America, how the Performance Engineering team has grown over the past couple of years, and what makes Perficient Latin America a unique and attractive place to do performance engineering. Likewise, he’ll touch on Perficient Latin America approach to employee development and what potential hires have to look forward when joining Perficient Latin America software outsourcing team.
The Road to Performance Engineering
More frequently, companies are starting to give performance the attention it demands as users become more and more demanding of their applications’ responsiveness and stability. While performance engineering was once thought of as just a set of testing practices, the discipline has expanded into a culture that closely observes different pieces of the development lifecycle that factor into a system’s optimal performance. This requires performance engineers to pay special attention to factors such as hardware, security, configuration, business value, usability, software, and the customer, rather than just run run-of-the-mill performance scripts.
The Perficient Latin America performance engineering team’s journey with performance began, like many other performance journeys begin, with the implementation and refinement of performance testing. However, it soon expanded to include several key components that lead to the development of a strong performance culture at Perficient Latin America.
The team’s commitment to continuous improvement and learning has allowed them to gain insight into the discipline of performance engineering. With this knowledge, they have the ability to complement and refine a performance engineering process on a client by client basis that takes into account performance testing, data analysis, shifting performance left, performance monitoring, and incorporating data science and machine learning when possible.
Implementing Performance Engineering in an Outsorcing Company in Latin America
An important part of the performance engineering team’s initiatives is the implementation of performance practices throughout the software development lifecycle on a company level. To achieve this, the team expanded and worked closely with different client projects to help companies start focusing on performance from the very beginning of the project. Implementing performance at the start of a project allows for better design and applications that will perform optimally from the get-go, rather than addressing performance as an afterthought.
The performance process for clients includes consultations with Perficient Latin America performance engineering experts and support in the design phase. During this time, Perficient Latin America performance experts spend time understanding a client’s business needs, the ins and outs of the application and then work with the Perficient Latin America team to ensure that the team is also recognizing the importance of performance. ensuring applications are designed to perform well and professionals at every step of the development cycle understand the importance of performance requirements.
Likewise, Perficient Latin America performance engineering team has been collaborating with Perficient Latin America DevOps and Data Science team to effectively combine lessons from different disciplines and technologies. The goal is to capitalize on lessons learned and streamline processes, like data analysis, that consume developer time. These collaborations will no doubt open doors to innovation and new methods that can help companies and performance engineers boost results and reduce production time significantly.
Transcript
Interviewer: Great! We’re back and we’re sitting down with Carlos Zuluaga, who’s Head of Performance Engineering at Perficient Latin America.
What’s one of your favorite things about working at Perficient Latin America?
Carlos Zuluaga: I like the people, and how the company works. I like the fact that company takes people very seriously, from the personal and the professional level. So, the company is really, really concerned about professional growth.
Interviewer: So, why don’t you tell us what we are doing at Perficient Latin America with performance engineering?
CZ: We are trying, to say so, deploy performance engineering as a whole discipline in the company to try, to say so, insert pieces of performance engineering at every stage of the software development lifecycle. We are doing that because we found, maybe two years ago almost, that although we were doing performance engineering in some projects, it was mostly in an empirical way. We did some projects in which we consider that it was necessary, but it wasn’t like a whole approach, like a comprehensive approach for the company.
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s considering working at Perficient Latin America?
CZ: Join us! Come here! In Colombia, you will not find easily companies with the amount of interesting projects that we have at Perficient Latin America. We use technology, we love technology but we are mostly in love with using that technology to improve the life of other people.
Interviewer: That’s absolutely fantastic.
CZ: Yeah, I love it.
—
Does Perficient Latin America sound like a good fit for you? Check out our job opportunities!
