Microsoft has today highlighted the story of Telus staff developer Katie Peters, who is encouraging widespread adoption of the latter’s code-hosting platform GitHub to help automate software development at the telecom.
Peters took a job as a software developer for Telus after graduating with a computer science degree in 2012. “I wanted to be the person that I wish could have helped me,” she said.
“There are so many complicated processes in a company as large as Telus and it’s really difficult to navigate,” says Peters, who is currently helping lead an initiative aimed at making it easier for the wireless carrier’s roughly 4,000 developers to collaborate.
Telus recently made GitHub available companywide and signed an agreement with Microsoft to help manage its enterprise-level use of the platform and provide GitHub training to developers.
Peters is “a brilliant developer and a brilliant technologist,” said Justin Watts, head of Telus’ engineering productivity team. “Katie is great at capturing that relationship with the developer and what our goals are.”
Peters is already shaking things up. Drawing inspiration from “The Unicorn Project,” a 2019 novel by Gene Kim about a group of renegade developers seeking to overthrow the existing order and make work more fulfilling, Peters has replaced the usual staid presentation decks with ones featuring swirling designs, pink and purple tones and cartoon unicorns, and adopted the book’s mantra of bringing “focus, flow and joy” to developers.
Transform chatted with Peters over Microsoft Teams from her home in Vancouver. You can catch her interview in full at the source page here.
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They’ve switched source control systems…how is this news?
Git has been around for a very long time now. I am surprised that it took Telus such a long time to adopt it.
Don’t be. Some of their systems still run on cobol. They breed mediocrity from the top-down. It’s nearly impossible to change anything there. This lady’s a fukcking champ, but I’m pretty certain its because she’s wants to be a lifer there. A few years and she’ll most certainly lose her edge. I hope I’m wrong.
A lot of big corps still use mainframes , CICS, Cobol, etc, etc. Too expensive to migrate and extremely difficult. Decades of programming to replace. A lot of companies are like if it works, don’t touch it.
Don’t be. Some of their systems still run on cobol.
They’ve finally caught up on tech blogs from 2012. That’s why it’s news.
From what I heard that place is just fukcking suffocating to work in as a developer. You literally go work there for career suicide.
Hope after 10 years she doesn’t become jaded.