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Differentiating Yourself and Your Product: Lessons from Vijaya Raghunathan, SVP and Head of Mortgage Servicing Technology at Truist

Published Oct 4, 2023

Updated Aug 22, 2024

2 min read

In this episode of the Engineering Leadership series, Rob Ocel talks with Vijaya Raghunathan, the Senior Vice President and Head of Mortgage Servicing Technology at Truist. Vijaya emphasizes the significance of competition in the mortgage servicing industry, not just among traditional banks but also against tech giants like Amazon and Netflix. Customers today expect a seamless user experience, and companies must find a balance between complying with regulations and making the process easy for borrowers.

They cover the challenges of managing legacy systems within the industry, highlighting the difficulty of maintaining older systems while keeping up with technological advancements. Vijaya reveals that her team's approach includes grassroots-driven innovation, allowing engineers to come up with proof of concepts during IP sprints to demonstrate their creative solutions.

Vijaya's career journey, from a project manager to a senior vice president, is also discussed. She emphasizes the importance of differentiation in one's career, achieved through consistency and delivering results.

Throughout the episode, Vijaya underscores the need for leaders to stand out and differentiate themselves among their peers. She believes that excellence alone might not be enough; differentiation sets individuals apart in a competitive environment.

They also explore how to help team members discover their unique strengths and differentiating characteristics. Vijaya highlights that people can learn from both positive and negative examples, allowing them to incorporate these lessons into their careers.

The discussion includes the importance of staying curious and aware of technological advancements. Vijaya personally sets an example by continuously seeking new certifications and knowledge in areas like AI, machine learning, and cloud technology.

Vijaya provides insights into the challenges and opportunities within the mortgage servicing industry. She touches on balancing innovation with legacy systems, the importance of differentiation in one's career, and her personal commitment to staying curious and learning about emerging technologies.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

How to be an Effective Technology Leader in an Agile Startup Environment with Daniel Chopson

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Engineering Management: Just a Detour? - Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb

Rob Ocel interviews Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb on engineering leadership. Engineering management was once thought of as an inevitable destination for engineers who sought advancement in their careers, but now engineers have more options than ever. Many engineering managers are becoming engineers again, and the role of manager requires a significant amount of emotional labor. Should anyone want to be an engineering manager? Charity shares her journey of becoming an accidental CTO and founder, despite never aspiring to be a manager. She talks about the importance of engineering managers, and how they help teams outperform those without one, but acknowledges the role is challenging and not always enjoyable. Charity and Rob discuss how good managers can transform a company. They are compared to the nervous system of a company, routing information and ensuring everyone has what they need to succeed. Charity highlights the difficulty engineers face when transitioning from a ticket system to a more autonomous work environment. This shift can be challenging, as engineers may struggle with the newfound freedom and responsibility. It can take years to fully make the transition, so leaders looking to promote engineers to management need to be committed to and patient with the transition. Both Charity and Rob agree that a strong social support system for engineering managers is necessary as the role can be isolating, and having a network of peers who understand the challenges can be invaluable. Charity Majors' experiences and perspectives shed light on the challenges and rewards of the role, and when engineers should and should not pursue this career path....

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Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation

Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation Why Build a Stripe App? I recently participated in an audio space with the Stripe team, and something they said really stuck with me: the Stripe app store is a growing area that isn't overly saturated yet. There's a lot of potential for new apps, and companies can use this opportunity to grow. I work at a company called This Dot Labs, and we've created several Stripe apps and even own one. After looking at the data, I can confirm that the Stripe team was right! Creating a QR Code Generator App For this tutorial, we'll build a QR code app that can take a URL and generate a code for it. This is a good use case to help you understand the ins and outs of Stripe's developer tools. Why QR Codes? QR codes are useful tools that have become common in e-commerce, restaurants, and other industries. While Stripe already has a QR code tool, we'll make our own to familiarize ourselves with their syntax and problem-solving approaches. Project Structure Before we dive into the implementation, let's look at the structure of our Stripe App QR Code project: * .vscode: Contains settings for Visual Studio Code * source/views: Holds the main application views * .gitignore: Specifies files to ignore in version control * stripe-app.json: Defines the Stripe app configuration * ui-extensions.d.ts: TypeScript declaration file for UI extensions * .build: this is where the built Stripe app gets placed. Step-by-Step Implementation 1\. Install Stripe Locally First, you need to install Stripe on your local machine. The documentation provides great instructions for this: * For Mac users: Use Brew to install * For Windows users: Download the package and add it to your environment variables You can find the details here in the stripe docs to install the Stripe CLI https://docs.stripe.com/stripe-cli When using Windows, you must do stripe login from Powershell, NOT from Git bash or any other tool. After the server is up, then you can continue using git bash for everything else. After stripe login, you need to enter stripe apps start. Once you do that, the server is up and running and you can go back to using git bash or any other tool. 2\. Install Dependencies We'll be using an extra package for QR code generation. Install it using npm: ` 3\. Set Up the Main Component Let's look at the home.tsx file, where we'll use Stripe's UI components: ` These components are similar to other UI libraries like Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS. 4\. Create the UI Structure Our app will have: * An input field for the URL * Validation using a regex pattern * Error handling for invalid URLs * QR code generation and display Here is the Home.tsx file that is located in the src/views folder ` * ContextView` is at the top level of the app where we see the Title and the link to the Stripe Docs that we placed in our Context View. * Box is how you use Divs. * Banners can be used to show notification errors or any other item you wish to display. * Textfields are input fields. * Everything else is pretty self-explanatory. 5\. Handle Content Security Policy One problem I personally ran into was when I tried to redirect users, the Stripe policies would block it since I did not express that I knew what it was doing. I had to go into the stripe-app.json file and mention the specific security policies. For this particular exercise, I kept these as null. This is my stripe-app.json file. ` 6\. Configure App Views As you can see here, the stripe-app.json file shows the views for each file I have. The Home.tsx file and the Invoice.tsx are also included This is our way of saying that for each view we have, show the app functionality on that page. Our stripe-app.json file will show it but also, the manifest.js file in our .build folder will also show the same. Any view that doesn't have a file will not show the application's functionality. So, if I were to go to transactions, the app would not show the same logic as the home or invoices page. By following these steps, you'll have a fully functional QR code generator app for Stripe. This is just a simple example, but the potential for Stripe apps is massive, especially for businesses serving e-commerce customers. If you need help or get stuck, don't hesitate to reach out, danny.thompson@thisdot.co. The Stripe team is also very active in answering questions, so leverage them as a resource. Happy coding!...

Dec 18, 2024

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stripe

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use Dialogs are a common component added to applications, whether on the web or in native applications. Traditionally there has not been a standard way of implementing these on the web, resulting in many ad-hoc implementations that don’t act consistently across different web applications. Often, commonly expected features are missing from dialogs due to the complexity of implementing them. However, web browsers now offer a standard dialog element. Why use the dialog element? The native dialog element streamlines the implementation of dialogs, modals, and other kinds of non-modal dialogs. It does this by implementing many of the features needed by dialogs for you that are already baked into the browser. This is helpful as it reduces the burden on the developer when making their applications accessible by ensuring that user expectations concerning interaction are met, and it can also potentially simplify the implementation of dialogs in general. Basic usage Adding a dialog using the new tag can be achieved with just a few lines of code. ` However, adding the dialog alone won’t do anything to the page. It will show up only once you call the .showModal() method against it. ` Then if you want to close it you can call the .close() method on the dialog, or press the escape key to close it, just like most other modals work. Also, note how a backdrop appears that darkens the rest of the page and prevents you from interacting with it. Neat! Accessibility and focus management Correctly handling focus is important when making your web applications accessible to all users. Typically you have to move the current focus to the active dialog when showing them, but with the dialog element that’s done for you. By default, the focus will be set on the first focusable element in the dialog. You can optionally change which element receives focus first by setting the autofocus attribute on the element you want the focus to start on, as seen in the previous example where that attribute was added to the close element. Using the .showModal() method to open the dialog also implicitly adds the dialog ARIA role to the dialog element. This helps screen readers understand that a modal has appeared and the screen so it can act accordingly. Adding forms to dialogs Forms can also be added to dialogs, and there’s even a special method value for them. If you add a element with the method set to dialog then the form will have some different behaviors that differ from the standard get and post form methods. First off, no external HTTP request will be made with this new method. What will happen instead is that when the form gets submitted, the returnValue property on the form element will be set to the value of the submit button in the form. So given this example form: ` The form element with the example-form id will have its returnValue set to Submit. In addition to that, the dialog will close immediately after the submit event is done being handled, though not before automatic form validation is done. If this fails then the invalid event will be emitted. You may have already noticed one caveat to all of this. You might not want the form to close automatically when the submit handler is done running. If you perform an asynchronous request with an API or server you may want to wait for a response and show any errors that occur before dismissing the dialog. In this case, you can call event.preventDefault() in the submit event listener like so: ` Once your desired response comes back from the server, you can close it manually by using the .close() method on the dialog. Enhancing the backdrop The backdrop behind the dialog is a mostly translucent gray background by default. However, that backdrop is fully customizable using the ::backdrop pseudo-element. With it, you can set a background-color to any value you want, including gradients, images, etc. You may also want to make clicking the backdrop dismiss the modal, as this is a commonly implemented feature of them. By default, the <dialog> element doesn’t do this for us. There are a couple of changes that we can make to the dialog to get this working. First, an event listener is needed so that we know when the user clicks away from the dialog. ` Alone this event listener looks strange. It appears to dismiss the dialog whenever the dialog is clicked, not the backdrop. That’s the opposite of what we want to do. Unfortunately, you cannot listen for a click event on the backdrop as it is considered to be part of the dialog itself. Adding this event listener by itself will effectively make clicking anywhere on the page dismiss the dialog. To correct for this we need to wrap the contents of the dialog content with another element that will effectively mask the dialog and receive the click instead. A simple element can do! ` Even this isn’t perfect though as the contents of the div may have elements with margins in them that will push the div down, resulting in clicks close to the edges of the dialog to dismiss it. This can be resolved by adding a couple of styles the the wrapping div that will make the margin stay contained within the wrapper element. The dialog element itself also has some default padding that will exacerbate this issue. ` The wrapping div can be made into an inline-block element to contain the margin, and by moving the padding from the parent dialog to the wrapper, clicks made in the padded portions of the dialog will now interact with the wrapper element instead ensuring it won’t be dismissed. Conclusion Using the dialog element offers significant advantages for creating dialogs and modals by simplifying implementation with reasonable default behavior, enhancing accessibility for users that need assistive technologies such as screen readers by using automatic ARIA role assignment, tailored support for form elements, and flexible styling options....

Oct 25, 2024

4 mins

HTMLJavaScript

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Differentiating Yourself and Your Product: Lessons from Vijaya Raghunathan, SVP and Head of Mortgage Servicing Technology at Truist

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