What is your role?
Director of Engineering
What brought you to Uplift?
I came to Uplift for two main reasons: the people are great and I feel I have the opportunity to help build a great Des Moines based company.
What is your favorite thing about working at Uplift?
For me the people I’m working with are fantastic.
What does your day to day look like in your current role?
Most of my day is spent working with the team at a single client. This includes increasing my understanding of the client’s business and how the work our teams do impacts their business. I also often find myself pairing and writing tests for the code I produce. Often times clients also rely on our team to help them learn to write tests, pair, create deployment pipelines, better utilize the cloud, and other techniques our team members have picked up along the way.
What are the trends in technology that you are seeing right now?
I’m seeing a bigger push for automation. It feels like our industry is starting to learn manual testing isn’t always the best course of action. I’m also seeing lots of teams that have adopted “agile”, “scrum”, “kanban”, etc., but they haven’t adapted how the software gets built to aid these processes. Something else I’m seeing is a misconception of what changes are required from developers, operations, quality assurance, and business leaders to leverage the idea of DevOps in their organizations.
What is the best career lesson you have learned so far?
The people I’m working with have much more influence over my level of joy than what I’m doing with those people. I’ve taken jobs based on the tech stack, but found no more joy in what I was doing. I’ve taken jobs for more money, but found no more joy in what I was doing. The people I work with day-to-day have a much greater impact on my level of joy than almost anything else.
What is your proudest accomplishment?
My proudest accomplishment in terms of career is probably working on a product for two and a half years while shipping to production at least weekly. We were able to do this while also keeping our production bug count to three in two and a half years.
Something you are currently excited about related to your job?
I’m really excited at the opportunities and difference I’m able to make at Uplift. I’ve only been here a short time, but I’m already helping put together an internship program that I hope will help people better prepare for working on software products.
What motivates you?
Quite simply challenges. I like solving problems and overcoming challenges.
Who has had the biggest impact on your life?
My dad has been the greatest impact on my life. I watched him raise two kids for several years as a single dad. During his time as a single dad he was able to get his associates degree from DMACC so that he could get out of the retail world and be there for my sister and I.
What are your hobbies?
I enjoy coaching my kids soccer teams (this one can be stressful at times though), date nights with my wife, playing soccer for a little exercise, and fiddling with different or new tech.
Fun fact about yourself:
I’ve been with my wife since we were 15 years old. We will have been married for 11 years on October 10th this year.