Across the United States, tech communities in major hubs each carry a distinct culture and approach to innovation, reflecting the diverse landscape of American ingenuity.
From Silicon Valley’s sunny streets to New York City’s bustling avenues, each ecosystem thrives on its unique blend of talent, technology and tenacity.
Amid this diverse and dynamic landscape, Boston’s tech industry is unique for its deep academic roots, rich history of innovation and collaborative community culture. But the appeal extends far beyond these elements, with the city playing host to a vibrant startup scene, incubators and tech meetups that encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing.
In Boston, innovations in biotech, clean energy, robotics and more will continue to make waves. All the while, an environment where tech leaders and ideas can flourish ensures that is possible.
Within this ecosystem, engineering leaders like Ali Aslam and Sophia Knowles excel in solving complex problems, collaborating with talented people and growing every step of the way.
These senior engineers from Klaviyo and WHOOP offered a glimpse into the daily rhythms and challenges that define their roles — and the communities they contribute to at work and throughout Boston.
Klaviyo’s marketing platform transforms first-party data into customized digital experiences that enhance e-commerce interactions and foster direct, meaningful connections between creators and their audiences.
Do your days follow a familiar pattern or tend to be full of surprises? What are the must-do habits or key moments of each day in your role?
I’d say it’s a good balance. Klaviyo is a growing company with smart, ambitious people. It would get pretty boring if every day followed the same predictable pattern. Our engineering and product teams do a great job planning out our quarters. The upfront quarterly planning and resource mapping bake in the necessary predictability for our teams to complete the work successfully. Often, you have to deal with a curveball. There could be an unforeseen dependency on another team or an external partner. Or the scope of a project could change due to changing requirements. Still, teams tend to be very collaborative and always help each other with projects.
As for must-do habits and key moments in a day, planning ahead, effective time management and ruthless prioritization are critical. The Klaviyo culture encourages bias toward action. We may not always make perfect decisions, but having forward momentum and making features available for our customers quickly and iterating is always a win. I love to have a genuine, in-person conversation with a fellow Klaviyo. I really missed the social interactions during the pandemic.
Planning ahead, effective time management and ruthless prioritization are critical.”
How do you set your personal and professional priorities each day? What project are you most excited to be working on right now?
The planning process at Klaviyo is a good catalyst for setting the right priorities. Most of my professional priorities are a combination of company-wide initiatives and team projects. Being an engineering company, there is also a healthy emphasis on continuous code refactoring and performance improvements. As a manager of software engineers, my number one priority is always to enable my team to do their best work. Taking on a task to get them unblocked or finding ways to give them more uninterrupted focus time is always high on my list. My personal priority is always to increase my own learning, whether it’s a management topic or a technical topic. Klaviyo’s learning culture and the learning stipend benefit help that endeavor.
In addition to making all of our Klaviyo integrations world-class, one particular project I’m excited to be working on is our Integration Generation Framework. At Klaviyo, we want as many companies as possible to easily integrate with us and allow customers to use our amazing features. This project will allow any developer to quickly and easily create an integration with Klaviyo and start sending and receiving useful data.
Do you have any local spots or organizations key to your daily success? A favorite coffee spot fueling your work? A tech org you partner with?
The engineering team stays pretty active with several Boston area software engineering, data science and management meetup groups. Klaviyo has also fostered great relationships with groups like Resilient Coders and Girls Who Code to spread the love for coding. Our engineers bring back many new ideas from attending an annual technical conference of their choice and participating in our hackathons. I recently attended QCon in San Francisco and plan on attending a data science conference later this year.
All that coding needs fuel. Klaviyo keeps us well-stocked with a variety of teas and coffees. But when I’m in the mood for a walk, it’s always fun to grab a chocolate croissant at Tatte or a hazelnut draft latte at La Colombe Coffee in the Seaport.
WHOOP provides a wearable device and platform designed to elevate human performance, offering users insights into their physical state and lifestyle.
Do your days follow a common pattern or tend to be full of surprises? What are the must-do habits or key moments of each day in your role?
My days typically start the same but then tend to go many different ways. Usually, I come into the office and review any PRs I missed or need to get out that day. After that, you never know. On some days, the rare ones, I get a full day of uninterrupted coding on a feature we’re building. More likely, I’m context-switching between fixing bugs that pop up, answering other developers’ technical questions, and technical planning and estimating for upcoming projects. I’d say most of my days contain a good amount of code reviews and discussions on technical implementation, a sprinkle of meetings, and the rest of the time is heads-down coding.
As a senior developer, I think my role is less about the amount of code I can contribute daily and more about creating quality code and then sharing that and upskilling others. That’s why I focus a lot of energy on giving quality code reviews and always being open to questions from my team. I also like working with and creating connections with people, so I spend some of each day just catching up with people — whether it’s about what they are working on or how their commute on the T was delayed for that day.
I focus a lot of energy on giving quality code reviews and always being open to questions from my team.”
How do you set your personal and professional priorities each day? What project are you most excited to be working on right now?
I play competitive ultimate frisbee — reigning national champs! Balancing personal and professional priorities is something I have to map out every day between training, practice, and work. Sometimes, I have to set a hard stop to prioritize practice at the end of my day, so I leave my code in an unfinished spot that’s hard to return to. Other times, I’ll miss a workout because of feature deadlines or bugs popping up at work. The longer I’ve balanced these things, the more I’ve gotten okay with not being able to do everything and just being present for what I’m focusing on at the time.
A project that I’ve enjoyed working on recently has been completely rebuilding our web setup for our team. We created a monorepo, which has enabled much faster component building and sharing between apps. We also rewrote our join flow to be up with the tech times and built in react on next instead of using very outdated code. Since we started fresh, implementing web-wide best practices has been much easier. All of this has helped us iterate significantly faster and is a much simpler and more enjoyable code base to contribute to.
Do you have any local spots or organizations key to your daily success? A favorite coffee spot fueling your work? A tech org you partner with?
The snack room on the eighth floor in the WHOOP office is a key driver to my success. Lunchtime with the team and 3 p.m. cheese time are important pieces of my day!
More seriously, I’m a pretty big proponent of work-life balance. Outside of work I’m trying to be outside or moving as much as possible so that I can be refreshed when I go back to work. This winter I spent a lot of time at Healthworks working out or relaxing in the sauna. Now that it’s getting nicer out, you can catch me trail running in the Fells or biking to find fun places to read outside.