Meet Volie's VP of Engineering - Samuel Davis

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Welcome everyone to another volley rally. I am pinch hitting today for Jake and very excited today to have a special guest. We're doing the meet the staff folks today. I've got one of our technical founders, Sam Davis. How you doing Sam?

Doing good. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Scott.

Yeah, if you're wondering about the Scott part, it feels weird every time he says it. Sam is actually my oldest son and one of my, like I said, one of my two technical co founders. Sam, why don't you tell a little bit about yourself? Okay.

Yeah. So my wife and I live in Fort Myers. We have a 18 month daughter live in Fort Myers. Like a lot of the volley crew, been here since 2011 with a hand with a couple of stops in between but for the most part since 2011, yeah.

So when it all started in, in late 2017, Sam did most of the user screens and all that stuff. All, all the things that you guys use every day. If I say Peter is done a lot of the data mattress stuff, Sam, what would you say that, that your contribution to volley up until this point? Definitely at the start when we had no developers to now we've got 12 or 13. But from, from starting until this point. Why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, so really at the start and you know, Peter, Peter always, you know, kind of jokes that he doesn't like to do front end. So you know, really until we started acquiring, you know, lots of new team members on the team, you know, I primarily did all the, the screens that you guys use in the application and you know, as we've gotten more team members, we've been able to kind of get more people off and I've been able to do more, you know, other activities, you know, in the back end. But I guess, you know, at a simple, at a simple level, you know, the communication center, you know, has gone through a lot of iterations but that's probably the screen most people use every day that you know, had a pretty heavy handed.

So what's a typical day like for you now that you've got a team underneath you?

Yeah, so a typical day for me now, you know, I still have some calls mixed in here there, but for the most part I get, I get a good amount of heads down time. I'm usually always working on kind of a bigger task sprinkled in with some little tasks. In addition to that, I constantly am managing production, making sure that the application is running fast, efficiently so that everyone has a good day inside of volley and you know, throughout the day I'll also meet with our developers and make sure that everyone's doing okay and that you know, see if anyone has any questions or needs any help. And otherwise, you know, just try and get some head down time and work on kind of some of these railroad type tasks so that we can continue to build some awesome functionality for you guys.

Wanted to just kind of give you guys a little peek behind the current, the curtain here of, of what we've got going on. Sam, what types of stuff are you working on right now?

Yeah, so we've got lots of, we've got lots of, lots of things in development right now that I think you guys will all be pretty excited about. We've got Agent Qi in progress. We've got a brand new ivr, some new, some enhancements to some of the existing screens that you guys use every single day like the campaign attempt management screen, some new settings to the Agent Visibility screen, the live dashboards, getting a calls tab with Barge and Listen and coaching functionality. Also been working on some back end related things in the customer matcher space specifically with some enhancements to our matching algorithm and some kind of subtasks that come along with that. We've also got some other integrations in play. We of course just launched our Stella integration, but we also have Techeon coming soon, one DMS and a couple other things as well. So we've got a lot of things in, in, you know, on, on the hopper for you guys that we're very excited to show. Also to mention there's some new reporting that's going to be coming out very soon as well as kind of what we're calling the reporting builder. The report builder. These will be.

Yeah. One of the things that is, is interesting is you pretty much no code passes through volley without you approving it. Would you say that's true?

Yeah. So I'm kind of the, the final lever to get code into kind of our next stage of our environment. So we have got kind of a, and we, and we've, we've changed these processes over time. You know, as we've gotten bigger, as we've evolved a little bit, we've, you know, improved our process. One of these processes was some changes to how we manage our pull requests or basically when developers write new code that's got new functionality or have bug fixes or whatever it may be, it gets opened into what's called a pull request. Those pull requests go up for review. Right now our process has, we call it a three step review process. And it goes to different members on the team so that different eyes and hands can get on it. Valuable feedback can be given to the developer that did it. They can work and make any changes necessary. And then finally it comes to me. Every single week we meet as a team, review the code together one final time and go ahead and merge it.

One of the things that people probably don't think about, I never do with software, but just at a high level volley, is a front end, a back end, a database, many other components. You want to kind of talk about that high level?

Yeah. So, you know, we've been asked by people, lots of people before, whether it's at nada or whether it's on, you know, sales demos or even by existing customers. You know, what's our stack? You know, our stack is, is very modern. It's a golang backend with a Vue JS front end sitting on a postgres database, all hosted in Amazon aws. And you know, we work hard to maintain, you know, current version parity and make sure that we're, you know, up to date on all of the necessary security requirements and things that, you know, you constantly have to work through in today's changing world. You know, we are SOC 2 compliant and that's another thing that, that we work, we work on every single week to, to remain compliant. And you know, because, you know, we take that stuff very seriously. So.

So a lot of developers, it's pretty common for them to either do the front end or the back end. We haven't, we haven't maybe had people specialized enough, but some people are better at some than others, right?

Yeah, I mean, we, you know, we, I guess with the exception of, of Peter, like I said, who, who just, who doesn't really like to work on, to work on front end. And he'll, he'll openly joke about that though. He will if he needs to. It's just kind of a joke that we, you know, the developers always tease him about. But, but yeah, everyone Involi's Full Stack Engineer, you know, a lot of people, you know, a lot of the two new team members that we've hired in the last year, they've not had front end experience and you know, we, we help, we help them and help train them and help them learn and grow and you know, everyone in Bali works in all phases of the application and, and you know, it's really nice to have a team that you can really just give anyone any task and kind of, you know, kind of let them put their heads down and work through it.

So, so we plan things out 1/4 ahead, 2/4 ahead, a year ahead. What kind of goes into the process of, of going from idea to end product?

Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot that goes into the process. It's something that, you know, takes a lot of planning and thought. And even when you, and even when you plan it out and kind of, you know, map it out, you know, things still sometimes change. You know, I mean, you get, you get deep into something and realize it could be more complicated or than you expect, or it could be easier than you. And not only that, there's other things that come in day to day that kind of throw off the timelines a little bit, such as, you know, bugs and tickets, you know, and also, you know, you know, other things that come up, like scalability, you know, things that, you know, we don't know about at the time of planning that we realize we need to prioritize to make sure that you guys always have a great experience in Bali. And, you know, so a lot, a lot of thought gets, gets put into it. We planned every single quarter and then on top of that, we meet at the end of every single month re outline the whole month. And in more than that, we also meet one to two times a week to go over the list, just at a high executive level, not even counting the developer level, where whom we meet with every single week as well to, you know, to make sure that we're all on the right track. So it's a bit, it's a big machine and, you know, it's not perfect, but we're trying to optimize and improve it every single, every single day. And, you know, certainly there's lots of really exciting things that are going to be coming out this year that we're, we're very excited about.

So we're getting better at discipline with our development. Things do change. We, we do develop based on what our customers want us to develop. So sometimes the priority does change. One thing that's a lot different from 2017, we might have been at the end of 2018 and compared to now, we might be from a data standpoint, 1,000 times bigger. Would that be a guess? It really impacts the amount of big things you can work on at one time, right?

Yeah, I mean, we're, we're definitely past the, the point of, you know, easy tasks in a sense. You know, I mean, you know, for example, you know, you know, back in the day, you know, if we wanted to, let's just Say, you know, make a change to our vehicle structure, you know, based on feedback that you guys give us or that, you know, something that we see in the logs or whatever it may be, you know, we might have been able to kind of, you know, fix it in place or even add the new feature in place. But nowadays because of the scale of our data and you know, how many millions of records there are, in a lot of cases billions, you know, we have to, to be a little bit more strategic with how we go about, you know, implementing these changes. And you know, that's something that we, we consider all the time. So we're we're constantly, you know, trying to make sure that we're on top of our game as far as, you know, database engines go and making sure that we're utilizing the tools the best we can so that we can continue to scale and perform at a high level. So, you know, there's a, definitely a lot of thought and, and process that goes into play as you know, before, before the code even gets out into production, before you guys even see it.

So yeah, just without going, making us blind with numbers, why don't we, why don't we just toss out one off the top of your head. I mean, at our peak times, how much is happening every second in Valley?

Many, many millions of, of requests a minute. So you know, I mean, and, and down to the second, it's, it's, it's in the millions as well. So you know, we, and not only that, we also process an extremely high amount of what we call real time events. You know, events that basically, you know, that the, the user isn't necessarily getting that data from the server. The server is pushing it across all the users through websockets. So you know, know those events allow us to push inbound calls, text messages, emails, you know, you know, agent status changes, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Those allow us to push it to everyone so that they can all see those changes in real time. So there's, there's just a lot of traffic that's going through the application during the peak hours and even, and even overnight there's still traffic that comes in, you know, we're always receiving, you know, emails, email events, messages, you know, things like that. You know, and even phone calls, you know, we get after hours calls that, that we, you know, handle based on your guys's configurations. And you know, we're, we're constantly, you know, processing that. So you know, that's why we, you know, we've got a plan in place for how we, you know, how we make sure that the app is always functioning, you know, to the ability that you guys need it to be. And, you know, there's a lot of thought that goes into play for, you know, for getting new code out and making changes and, you know, making sure that you guys don't ever. Don't ever, you know, feel any. Any slowness or anything like that.

So I hope everyone liked. I just wanted to give a little. Introduce Sam and give a little bit peek around the corner or behind the curtain, I guess, whatever the metaphor is. I kind of combined a couple there. One last question. What do you love most about Volley?

Oh, the. The culture and the people we get to work with, for sure. So, you know, we. We started out with just Scott, Peter, and I, and from there, we've. We've grown into a really big, you know, group of people, you know, both internally and externally. You know, we. You know, we. We really love being a part of all of your guys's call centers and. And BDCs and dealerships and. And. And, you know, that's something that we. We don't take lightly. You know, we. We want to, you know, you guys, to have a great experience in the app and. And, you know, for us to, you know, to be beneficial in that sense. And internally, you know, it's an amazing group of people. There's, you know, not only a lot of, you know, personally, you know, family members in a sense, but also a lot of people that are, you know, that maybe we didn't know that, you know, because we're getting big enough now that we're running out of family members. But, you know, everyone's just great. You know, we. We live by our. Our mission statement and our core values, and everyone on the team exemplifies those to the te. So coming to work is really fun. And, you know, it's hard, but it's. It's. It's worth doing. So just a great.

Yeah, one of the things that's a little bit different just kind of a change, just because we feel like it's so important that Sam and Peter get to see how you guys are using Volley. We're getting them out in the stores every quarter, at least a little bit, and it might be 2 times 1 quarter, but you get the point. Sam's coming with me to see a customer tomorrow, and we really do look at how you're using it. We want it to be a great experience. I think it's pretty likely that you guys will see Sam on the next volley session that we'll have in about a month. So anything else for today, Sam?

No, just thanks for having me. You know, we, we live and breathe volley. We, we love helping your, helping your guys businesses and making your, you know, you know, your agents lives much easier and you know, making your managers lives much easier and you know, we, we love doing it and we're, we're here to stay and we're, we're excited about, you know, the outlook of 2024 from a dev perspective. You know, I'm really excited to get these new features into your guys hands and you know, the screens that are getting updated. You know, we're really excited for you guys to see that and for us to get some feedback and continue to make it great for you guys.

Great stuff. Thanks Sam. Have a good day.

Thanks Scott. Bye.