Below is an edited version of my internal About Me guide that I share. I recommend everyone on my team create and share it with their team to fast track getting to know eachother and volunteer information about how to best work with you. There's no perfect format, anything folks can share can help get the ball rolling. :)

👋 Hi, I’m Marcus - nice to meet you!

Languages: English, Swedish, so-so Spanish & Mandarin Chinese Pronouns: He / him / his

I have been at Twilio Segment for 4+ years, starting as a staff engineer.

Previous to Segment I tried my hand at my own startup, built an Alexa Skill, worked at a small startup, and spent 8 years at Salesforce (where I architected Salesforce Topics -- backbone for collaboration tool in Chatter & Community Cloud). During my time at Salesforce, I did some short stints in Paris & Stockholm.

My parents are from Sweden so I grew up speaking Swedish and visiting Sweden very summer. I am teaching my two kiddos Swedish too!

🛠️ Work work work

Schedule

My schedule is 9:00-5:00pst and sometimes getting on at 9pm when the kiddos have gone to sleep.

Communication

I enjoy async communication. I have notifications turned off permanently on my Slack. When it’s late at night, I like to schedule emails / slack to be sent in the morning as opposed to messaging folks at night. If you see a slack arriving exactly at 8am that is why.

I am on Manager Schedule so feel free to ping me anytime and I’ll prioritize appropriately.

You don’t need to schedule a meeting to have a Zoom/Slack call with me -- I’m totally fine with ad hoc calls. Based on my experience, 10 minutes Zoom call can be more productive than 30+ mins dialog in Slack 🙂 — If urgent, feel free to call or text me.

Feedback

I’m not perfect and want to grow as a leader. I know, for example, I tend to be conflict averse. If you see an opportunity for me to be 10% better even I’d love it! Appreciate direct and if possible specific feedback! A DM in Slack or can always hop on a call to discuss works great too. Thank you!

Values

Advice I often share with engineers on my team:

  • Write It Down – everyone processes ideas differently. Writing things down enables more asynchronous work and focus. It also scales to be inclusive of more opinions as a document may be re-shared. Lastly, it is an artifact that can be referred back to.
  • Code Wins – when everyone is just debating back and forth, sometimes it’s best to just write the damn code and ship. Folks will more easily align if something is already done.

🕺🏼 Outside of work

Mostly these days it’s just surviving the kids. If I’m healthy I’ll play pickup ultimate frisbee once a week. Otherwise travel to visit my brother in Sonoma County or do a quick bicycle ride up Tilden park. Once a year I like to meet my high school friends and go someplace low-key to catch up and play basketball — Boise was very nice.

Everything else I love…

  • Skiing — done a lot of downhill skiing, bit of off-piste, and a little telemarking. In a parallel life I would spend a lot more time on the slopes.
  • Coffee — I have lots of coffee devices and have roasted a fair bit of home roasting using a Popcorn Popper with advice from https://www.sweetmarias.com/
  • Podcasts - Throughline, Anthropocene Reviewed
  • Books - 3 body problem, Murakami books
  • vi

Things I dislike…

  • 2018 Macbook pro buttterflyyy keyyboard 😅