A Really Good Second Pair of Eyes

This month (October) is my two-year anniversary at appendTo. Two years may not sound long to you but in the tech world it is a bit of an eternity. My wife Brittany still can’t believe I’ve stayed that long–most of my other jobs have been project-based and have lasted a year or less. When I started with appendTo my desire was to find a place to hang my hat for a while. And here I am, two years later, and the hat is still on the hook.

I flew to Tacoma with a co-worker, Matt, a few weeks ago, to help a large, enterprise company conduct an internal hackathon for their IT support team. We functioned as technical coaches, helping each of the five teams participating to make decisions about technical trade-offs (they had two days to finish their projects), and to help mitigate any technical obstacles that arose. It was a marvelous, albeit exhausting experience. When we met with this company’s leadership for the first time I was asked to describe what appendTo is all about, and this is what I said:

appendTo’s name is a play on the the jQuery function of the same name. In JavaScript we often want to take an element, say a hyperlink or a some emboldened text, and append it to some other element, like a paragraph. Our company has a similar relationship to the clients it engages: we append to that client, becoming a part of its team, to help accomplish its goals with our own expertise and values. We are very fast, and very effective.

I was then asked about my personal qualifications as a technical coach. Each team, in theory, could choose any technology stack for their project (though each project had to function on mobile devices), but in reality the company had a significant Microsoft infrastructure. Matt and I had spent a good deal of time discussing the potential technical avenues each team might take, and we had concluded that, given the time constraints and culture of the company, Microsoft-based, cloud hosted solutions were likely candidates.

Fortunately I have experience with the .NET stack, which put the client at ease. But I also stressed that my career has spanned many stacks, languages, frameworks and paradigms, and that I had sought from the beginning to be a generalist, not a specialist. To me, understanding problems is more important than particular solutions, which may be myriad. Problems are always contextual.

The leadership team then asked what I thought about my role in the hackathon. I replied: “I am going to be a really good second pair of eyes.”

It was a decent elevator pitch.

Each team ended the week with polished projects, and though we were all tired and giddy from the process, an intense camaraderie emerged. Both Matt and I lived up to the promises we made and the client was very pleased.

I’ve since reflected on the claims I made in our initial meetings (all of which I believe), and projected them onto the backdrop of my experiences at appendTo. I’ve worked with a lot of clients, on a lot of projects, with a lot of different technologies. I’ve produced code, written articles, coached a hackathon, given presentations, migrated a mountain of WordPress data (a task I would not wish on my enemies), created and contributed to open source projects, and so on. For each client engagement I straddled the line of being uniquely me, and being that second pair of eyes; of maintaining my own personal boundaries and standards, while appending to an existing team or management structure with their own goals and values. I’ve seen my co-workers do the same, time and again, in development, design, and management capacities.

There is a time for modesty, but this is not it.

appendTo harbors amazing people with amazing talents. Moreover, it treats its employees like entrepreneurs, free to grow their ideas and visions and passions while serving clients. It’s a petri dish for excellence. And this characteristic is intentional.

When I was first hired, I was told that appendTo was a place for recovering developers who had been abused by the corporate world. And though the journey is not always smooth (no good journey is!), the work I do here and the relationships I make are, and will continue to be, some of the most significant in my life. And for that I am both grateful and humbled.

*This blog post was previously featured on nicholascloud.com.