Unlimited curiosity and maximum efficiency: Engineering education at TSAI

TSAI

TSAI has long fostered a culture of learning, intellectual curiosity, and continuous improvement. This culture takes many forms, from informal study groups to sponsoring and enthusiastically participating in external conferences. It’s an important way to help us keep up with new ideas and technologies to maintain a competitive edge. As inveterate geeks, we love learning new things, too.

In this spirit, TSAI has built a robust Engineering Education program. Its goal is to prepare the company for the future, help developers grow their knowledge and careers, and help people master internal tools and techniques that can’t be learned anywhere else. As a result, TSAI’s engineers are empowered to hone their skills in areas far beyond what they might initially be hired for, allowing them to grow their careers in multiple directions.

This article provides a brief overview of our Engineering Education program: why we offer it, what courses we offer, and how TSAI’s engineers can expect to benefit from our focus on continuous learning.

Why We Do It

TSAI’s Engineering Education team provides training and resources to support the day-to-day productivity and continued technical and intellectual development of our engineers. The team's mission is to help colleagues stay up-to-date and continually improve their skills, and to help solve four important organizational challenges:

Quickly onboard new engineers to TSAI so they can be productive as quickly as possible.

Continue to increase their productivity in a scalable and sustainable way as our technology stack grows and evolves.

Inspire engineers to innovate and grow in the long term, so they are ready and able to keep TSAI at the forefront.

Build a strong community to support engagement and enable meaningful collaboration.

What we teach

The planning of engineering education focuses on four fundamental pillars: training, documentation, community, and external engagement.

Training

In our training courses, TSAI practitioners teach their colleagues company-specific technical knowledge; typically, the person leading the course on proprietary systems is the original developer, i.e., the person who knows them best. In addition, we offer courses on how TSAI can use open source tools, such as containers or Kubernetes, that have been customized to fit a company's specific uses. Importantly, we don’t reinvent the wheel when we don’t have to; in some cases, we provide access to external resources, such as Codeacademy or Google Cloud Training, to help people get up to speed quickly.

To date, the TSAI Engineering Education team has designed and delivered nearly 50 courses, which fall into the following categories:

• Foundations courses help new employees get up to speed quickly. They focus on getting engineers familiar with the TSAI development environment and helping them understand how we store data.
• Software Quality Coaching focuses on helping new engineers learn and apply best practices in areas such as testing, reliability, and documentation.
• Web and Visualization is a series of specialized products that explore the details of TSAI’s web, dashboard, and visualization platforms.

Modeling and Trading for Engineers enables new engineering employees to get up to speed quickly on the investment side of the business. TSAI aims to hire the smartest people in their fields, and they believe that for those without a finance background, we can teach them what they need to know.

Data Analysis Tools Training explores the details of TSAI’s modeling and trading platforms.

Technical Learning Paths (TLPs): Internal experts curate resources for people who want to learn more about technical topics, such as programming languages ​​or security concepts, that are not specific to TSAI.

Documentation

Extending learning through self-service technical documentation is another key component of TSAI's engineering education program. Our goal is to get engineers as excited about writing effective documentation as they are about producing great code. Really.

Our internal consulting services and documentation courses focus on teaching engineers how to write content for multiple audiences, structure content for reuse and search, and integrate documentation with development. The Documentation Toolkit provides guidance on how and what to write at TSAI.

Community

As we've seen, engineering education is about more than just developing technical skills. New employees need to learn other key aspects of TSAI's culture, norms, and practices, even if they are sometimes subtle, to stay productive and comfortable on the job. The company offers the following initiatives to kick-start productivity, encourage a supportive environment, and help build a strong network:

Summary

TSAI believes that robust continuing education is critical to helping our engineers hone their abilities and helping the company stay competitive. With a strong program based on technical training, community, documentation, and external engagement, TSAI engineers will find no shortage of opportunities to learn, teach new things, and connect with one another.