I had the pleasure of starting a team together with Shama last September, and the year we worked together was really great.

Shama has been a a really great person to work with, and for. She's helped shape me into a much better engineer, technical lead, mentor and team player.

Something that came up in a quarterly survey would be "does your manager inspire you to do your best work", to which I always answered yes for Shama - she's always helped me believe more in what we're doing, striving to leave things much better than when we found them, and coaching me to achieve my best.

One thing I commented on a number of times over the year working with her, is Shama's pragmatism. Shama's alwaws happy to do the right thing - making the best efforts to clean up a project before starting, making sure we're following best practices - but is also happy to ask questions of i.e. whether it makes sense to spend an extra half day doing some style improvements for a PR's code before it ships to production, or follow-up once it's on its way. It's been really helpful making sure we stay on track at times, and has helped with a number of cross-team working pieces too.

We've recently worked on a very difficult piece of work on some pre-loved software that spans multiple teams, and Shama was awesome - she got stuck in, digging to the bottom of problems, managing the situation really well, and was pivotal with getting us across to the other side!

And mostly, she's been proactive in providing the right feedback, nudging me, and giving me opportunities to grow myself. I've found it to be a great way of helping me focus on ensuring that I can support junior engineers better by being less involved in work, but jumping in when folks needed/wanted my help.

I'm going to miss working with her, and I'd thoroughly recommend others get the chance to work with her. Thanks for a great year together!