If you ask Belinda Loi – Manager of Network Automation at Cox Communications – to describe her team in one sentence, she’ll probably say something like this:
“We are building the next generation of network engineers with a focus on automation-first design.”
Born in Norway and based in Atlanta, Belinda said that her friends and coworkers alike would describe her as “a hype woman” – someone who loves bringing out the best in everyone, empowering others and collaborating for success.
“Our focus is not to build big applications, but rather services that support business processes,” she said. “It’s less about the applications or products, and more about training and growing our people to apply the open-source products that are already available.”
Belinda and team have the unique challenge and privilege of having multiple tech stacks beneath their umbrella. One specific one that comes to mind is Red Hat’s Ansible platform – which Belinda says is a flexible solution for helping network engineers “crowdsource” automation.
“With thousands of modules prebuild and curated into Ansible Galaxy Collections, you can create automation that turns up a VM, sends emails or reports, communicates with REST services, modifies ACL’s on network devices, deploys Docker containers, manages Kubernetes clusters or performs a backup of the configuration on your network devices…the possibilities really are endless.”
What does the word “innovation” mean to Belinda?
“Innovation is often born out of necessity, starting with an idea and fueled by passion,” she explained. “To supplement and foster innovation, the Network Automation team is working to equip our engineers with ways to leverage the latest technology stack to continue challenging the status quo and making things more efficient and reliable.”
One example of how Belinda’s team makes tech more efficient and reliable is a project that took place in 2021. Belinda’s team was asked to provide automation in support of NIST-800 compliance efforts that the Cox Business Engineering and Security teams were focused on delivering.
“This work would require some very complex cleanup and validation of our prefix-lists on the Cox Business Nokia fiber network, as the inventory is a staggering 45,000 devices strong and growing,” Belinda said. “That’s combined with some of the most cutting-edge and emerging software design patterns, GitOps, Network ‘as code’ and closed loop automation style principals as the core of the design.”
Partnering with other network engineers at Cox, Belinda and team set off to deliver an Ansible playbook that could maintain one source of truth about IP prefix-lists for this network, house those “golden configs” in Git and then calculate the remediation plan on a per host basis – executing and ensuring ongoing compliance in a unified way.
At the end of the project, the team deployed configurations to the entire Nokia Core (approximately 750 hosts) in all six regions of the enterprise on several separate occasions in 2021, causing zero service-affecting or zero-impacting outages. The project was even used as a source of demonstration for Pair Programming at Red Hat’s AnsibleFest 2021 Developer Conference.
“These kinds of opportunities and challenges are my favorite thing about working at Cox,” Belinda siad. “I like that I’m able to voice my opinion on projects and my leaders are very supportive of things I want to try.”
Belinda worked in the telecom industry before beginning her career at Cox and understands the importance of good workplace culture. Referring to the telecom company she worked for previously, Belinda said: “I was really invested in the company but didn’t feel like they were invested in me.”
When a recruiter reached out regarding an open position at Cox, Belinda was intrigued by the opportunity.
“Cox cares about their people,” she said. “It’s something we pride ourselves on and I was struck by that from the very beginning.”
Belinda feels that she’s contributed to meaningful tech transformation during her four years at Cox.
“At Cox, I feel like I’ve made an impact and that I’m valued,” she said. “There’s a path for my career here.”
Valentyna Yurtyn is always up for a challenge.
She’s an active person who can often be found hiking, biking, going to CrossFit and swimming in the Pacific Ocean – and the promise of adventure was the very thing that attracted her to a career in technology.
“What brought me to software engineering is the challenge,” said Valentyna, Principal Software Engineer at Cox Automotive. “I enjoy the changing environment.”
If you’ve ever shopped for a car online, chances are you’ve interacted with Valentyna’s work. Her group develops and maintains high-traffic websites for Cox Automotive brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book.
“Cox is ahead of the curve for things like native ads,” Valentyna said. “Sometimes I hear about companies doing things and I think ‘Oh, we’ve been using that technology for a while now; we integrated it a long time ago.’ We’re using a breakthrough approach. Our tech stack is wide and we have lots of different projects.”
Elaborating on the tech stack, Valentyna shared that her team builds micro-frontends with JavaScript ReactJS. For backend development, they build services using NodeJS, Microsoft ASP.NET Core and Java. All infrastructure uses cloud-based architecture with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
One of the most impactful projects for Valentyna’s team is working on web performance optimizations.
“Web performance has been at the top of the list in discussions within web developers’ communities,” Valentyna said. “Our company leadership made a commitment to focus on user-centric performance, and engineering teams work in coordination with ad sales, operations and product teams to identify performance opportunities.”
Valentyna’s team looks at different aspects of web performance and have been able to significantly improve user experience and performance metrics. They’ve driven server-side optimizations that improve response time and improve data query speed. They’ve driven content delivery network (CDN) updates for fast protocol, compression and image optimizations. They’ve driven UX and accessibility updates, like optimization of JavaScript bundles and improving cumulative layout shift (you can learn more about that project on our blog), as well as optimizations for analytics scripts and other third-party libraries.
“As I work on projects as a software engineer, I can see connections from start to finish and the results of the project,” Valentyna said.
Valentyna didn’t originally plan for a career in information technology. Her background is in business, and she slowly merged into a tech career when she realized she enjoyed its pace and potential.
“My degree in business actually helped me quite a bit,” she said. “It’s beneficial to have an understanding of business and good coordination with product teams.”
Software engineering teams at Cox are knee-deep in collaboration, often working in cross-functional discovery groups with colleagues in UX, analytics, research and more. Valentyna said that’s why she loves hackathons – a fast-paced event where different teams join forces on a project.
“It’s new and exciting to work with the team in quick sprints,” Valentyna said. “Not all ideas lead to successful implementation but executing on ideas and running user testing allows us to stay current with ever-changing environments.”
These are particularly challenging times for Valentyna, who is from Ukraine. While she has lived in the US since 2001, she has many friends and extended family who still reside in her home country.
“It’s been really scary and painful to watch,” Valentyna said. “It’s been hard to concentrate on anything else.”
Valentyna stressed the importance of staying informed about the current situation in Ukraine, contacting elected officials, keeping perspective on the impact of economic sanctions on Russia and making donations (the James M. Cox Foundation is leading by example by giving $500,000 to the American Red Cross to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian refugees).
“My biggest fear is that people around the world will get used to the war in Ukraine and move on with their lives,” Valentyna said. “Russia must be stopped. The war must be stopped.”
During a time filled with upheaval, Valentyna’s commitment to creating a meaningful impact stays the same, both at work and outside of it.
“To me, that’s what innovation means: responding to new environments and initiating change.”
There’s a stereotype about technology being an introverted profession.
As an artistic thinker and a self-professed social butterfly, Afsheen Mozammel is quick to negate any misconceptions about tech being an isolating field of work. It’s not uncommon to find her serving as a mentor, acting as a mentee or simply building relationships with peers and leaders.
“I like to connect with people,” Afsheen said. “That’s my thing. I’m very social.”
Connections are particularly important for Afsheen’s role as Manager of Engineering Enablement at Cox Communications – a fully remote role that is part of Cox’s Business Process Optimizations team. Afsheen’s group supports workflows of different technologies (including WATTS, OPTIX, EPS, JIRA, iGrafx and Visio) to ensure efficiency and visibility for Cox’s Field Engineer & Operations teams. In other words, Afsheen and her team use a data-driven approach to connect the dots between how a team operates and the impact it has.
“My team is always trying to find a way to get things done in a better and efficient manner without reinventing the wheel,” Afsheen said.
For example, one initative is an end-to-end engineering capability roadmap, where Afsheen’s team is exploring how to give Cox’s executive leaders a single source of truth for status, progress and collaboration opportunities among different engineering departments to minimize duplicate efforts and maximize efficiency.
Another example is a “proestimation” for time study. Afsheen and team used a data-driven approach to prioritize work based on business impact analysis, improving efficiency by 53%.
Afsheen, who was born in Dubai and raised in Bangladesh, pursued a tech career after getting her undergrad degree in business. After getting her master’s in industrial engineering, she worked for several different companies and often experienced a cutthroat, male-dominated and predominantly white environment.
“I was used to being the only woman in the room, let alone the only person of color in the room,” Afsheen said. “But if you asked me how I felt, I would say that I always felt like I was special. Because there was something about me that got me in that room.”
Afsheen began to crave a warmer atmosphere – literally. After 13 or 14 years of Midwest winters, she began to turn her attention toward a milder climate. Atlanta struck her as a good option, especially since her sister already lived there. Afsheen said that Cox – a values-driven tech company – appealed to her.
Afsheen was hired as an engineering manager at Cox and began to build a diverse team of tech experts. Having experienced a lack of diversity and inclusion at previous companies, Afsheen has made it a personal mission to be a champion for inclusion at Cox, getting involved with various inclusion efforts and serving as part of Cox’s ID&E ambassador program.
Afsheen’s life goal is “to impact people’s life in a positive way.”
“That’s my life’s work; my vision is to impact people whether I’m there or not,” Afsheen said. “Everything I do is a subset of that.”
Whether she’s leading her team on a new project, serving as a mentor for a fellow Cox employee or participating in inclusion efforts, Afsheen is encouraged to know that Cox’s vision is so well aligned with her own.
“[Working at Cox] is one of the best career moves I’ve ever made,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve worked with so many women in technology and the people here are so friendly. It feels like home.”
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