Jared Richadson is co-author (with Will Gwaltney) of one of my favourite software development books - Ship it!. Just a couple of weeks ago I gave away a copy of Ship It to a client but - to be honest - I am hoping they don't read it. If they do then they may not need to use me so much ...
Here's Q1 - Hey Jared, I thought Ship it! was a real keeper. I've recommended it to many of my clients and friends. Tell me a bit about yourself - both your personal life (if you don't mind) and your professional life. What makes you tick?
Let's see... big picture first. I'm married to a beautiful girl I met in high school, but couldn't land a date with her until I was in college. Not quite a high school sweetheart, but close. We have two daughters, ages 4 and 9. As Andy Hunt recently told me, it's not the time that kids take, it's the bandwidth. We live in Morrisville, North Carolina, which is in the middle of Research Triangle Park. We sit in the middle of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, which is to say, near the Duke Blue Devils, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, and the North Carolina State University Wolfpack. Basketball country.
Both personally and professionally, I'm a tinkerer. I don't like being locked into a single task or job.
I've built water-cooled computers (from components, not kits), including an evaporative cooling tower. :) I'm running OS X, Kubuntu Linux, and Windows XP in my home office. I've got a MythTV box that's very close to pushing out the satellite dish. I have a canoe and a kayak that don't make it into the water very often. A few years ago I wired my generator into my house's electrical circuit. I blew out a few appliances in the process, but that's another story. :) The lights over the kitchen table blowing out were spectacular!
After two years of consulting I joined a startup and I'm loving it. I get to tinker with architecture, write marketing literature, help with GUI redesigns, and sit in on sales calls. I've written Ruby code, set up Java application servers, and so on. I enjoy being at a small company where we all get to wear multiple hats.
What makes me tick? A problem I can immerse in for hours or days. When I'm working on this type of problem (right now I'm trying to find a completely different way to present the information our product collects and generates), I need to have dedicated time to dig into it, consider it, and bounce around different alternatives. I'll research alternatives on the web, scribble on white boards, mind map ideas on legal pads, and so on. I like to pull in other people to brainstorm and bounce ideas off of them... then I step away to another problem and let the first problem soak... (probably ferment!). But I keep coming back to the original problem. It always takes me longer than I want to solve these types of problems, which is frustrating, but when the problem is solved, it's very satisfying.
So I guess I'm task-oriented. I like a problem to solve.
I also like stepping back to see the bigger picture. I like to understand what the pattern is and why the problem occurred in the first place.
If we have to work overtime for weeks to get a release out the door, why was it that painful? We had no continuous integration system or test automation in place, so the product drifted into a brittle state. We spent too much time verifying our changes hadn't broken anything instead of adding new code.
Spotting (and fixing) these types of organizational patterns is what motivated Ship It! in the first place. It's really a book about these types of patterns you can use to map out your software shop. The startup I'm at (http://6sa.com) is gathering metrics about the way developers and teams work to spot some of these problems automatically. That's been an interesting challenge.
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