At the end of last year, a few of us headed up to Electric Shuffle in London for the 2021 Jammy Awards. Organised by cloud hosting company, Just After Midnight, the Jammies are all about celebrating exceptional development and engineering talent.
With just five categories to enter, we loved the concept of such a targeted and concise event, and upon its announcement, we got to work in selecting a number of Kyan’s software engineers fit for the categories on offer.
Amongst those were Carmen Lopez, who has been with us for almost five years, and Andrew Peng, who joined Kyan towards the end of 2019. We were delighted to see Carmen take a trophy home with her, and Andrew place as runner-up.
Here’s a little more about each entry, who we’re so lucky to have exceptional talent like Carmen and Andrew amongst our engineering team, and why this recognition is so important to us.
Carmen Lopez, Winner, The Ronaldo
"The Ronaldo is an expert in their field, equally as good on a team, on their own and speaking to clients – never stopping at upping their game."
We nominated Carmen for this entry because if tickets were balls and projects were goals, Carmen would be a consistently high scorer. She plays the full ninety minutes to the absolute best of her abilities and proudly wears the captain’s armband on her sleeve; communicating with her fellow players, keeping the manager happy, and even taking the time to help juniors from the B team.
Carmen has recently taken the lead on a project for OnSkil, an AI-powered recruiting tool. With some delicate work around apps and APIs, this was Kyan’s first commercial AI project, and whilst the client was over the moon, Carmen made it look like a kick-about in the park.
Obviously, the judges were wowed by Carmen’s a-game, and she too was over the moon to receive the award.
"Thank you for thinking of me for this category. I am trusted to handle different projects and because of this, I’ve been given some really interesting challenges to work on over the years."
Andrew Peng, Runner-up, The Rookie
"The Rookie is bossing a junior role, has already made a big impact in their team and is a future leader with heaps of energy and fresh ideas."
Andrew was a clear choice for us when it came to this category. Before joining Kyan, Andrew was a junior developer, but fast-forward just a few weeks and he had completed his technical onboarding in what our Head of Engineering, Nick, described as “record time”.
Equally competent and confident, PMs have trusted Andrew with weighty products since the get-go. One of our Kyan values is ‘Drive’, which we fondly describe as ‘getting sh*t done’. Andrew lives and breathes this value, and has been a key part of projects including our work with Baking Mad (a lively baking community with 1,600 recipes), as well as some taxing JS and Rails API work. He even found time to smash out some React projects.
Keep it up, Andrew! Loving your work.
The importance of recognising your own talent
It can be easy to bounce from one project to the next, particularly when you’re on the tools. But as a marketing team, we make it a fundamental part of our company culture to recognise our talent, and celebrate the creativity and success of our people.
Just After Midnight put on a superb evening, and we really commend them for taking the time to launch an awards night amongst their day-to-day work. We thoroughly enjoyed socialising with other agencies, making new friends and hearing what challenges other agencies have been munching through over the last two years.
A huge congratulations to all of the nominees and winners, and top work not only by Carmen and Andrew, but our ever-growing engineering team for giving us so much to be proud of.
We are Kyan, a technology agency powered by people.
