About Me

Howdy. Let’s start off with the name pronunciation – the Q can throw you off, phonetically it’s Ta-rick (rhymes with Eric).

I’m a Software Engineering and Technology leader in the San Francisco Bay Area who has a passion for buliding the culture and ecosystem of high performance engineering teams that are able to delight customers. In doing so, businesses are able to maximize their investment in technology, and ultimately achieve a strategic advantage over their competition.

I’m currently the Director of Software Engineering at Teletrac Navman, a leading global provider of telematics/vehicle centric GPS and IoT tracking software. Currently we’re tracking upwards of 600,000 assets (trucks, trailers, and fixed assets like generators) around the world into our SaaS based platform hosted on AWS.

 

 

Personal interests and activities

Although I have a lot of interests, my biggest passion is mountain biking, particularly the downhill kind.

 

Flex In Action

I’m the lead author of Flex 3 In Action and Flex 4 In Action books which are aimed at helping developers ramp up quickly in Adobe Flex, while at the same time diving very deep into core topics so that they have a solid foundation to build real world applications.

Books & Articles

Bell Sygma/Bell Canada (1994-1997)

My formal career began at Bell Sygma Telecom Solutions (a subsidiary of Bell Canada) based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I was fresh out of college, and it was at the same time the Internet and Web were beginning to emerge. It was positioned as a distributed online documentation vehicle, but I saw its potential as an application platform and became the web czar of Bell, visiting various engineering teams in order to train them on how to harness the technology (vs. the heavy thick clients that were being developed at the time). Also went on to create the first version of Bell Canada’s public website.

iSTAR/PSINet s (1997-1998)

The web was continuing to grow in popularity, and as with anything, the next people think of is how to monetize it. So eCommerce then became an exploding area, and iSTAR Internet (ISP) hired me to architect and implement Canada’s first national eCommerce platform. It was a brief stint lasting a little over a year as PSINet (an American ISP) acquired iSTAR (for the customer base), and seeing where the company was now headed (PSINet went bankrupt two years later) I set my eyes on California.

TIBCO Finance/REUTERS  (1998-2003)

Silicon Valley is really the heart of technology, and I had aspired to be in the San Francisco Bay Area in order to be immersed in it all. As destiny may have it, I was fortunate to join TIBCO Finance, a subsidiary of THOMSON REUTERS, as lead developer for a newly created intranet web team.

Our mission was to create a corporate community ecosystem by building an internal social media platform/content management system to facilitate collaboration across REUTERS and its 25,000 employees.

At this point I had been using C++, Perl, and Java to build web applications, but a colleague (Steve Fister) had introduced me to Adobe’s ColdFusion platform to build database driven web apps, which had really perked my interest. The return on effort was incredible via the productivity that it afforded, so we went all in with this technology.

Unfortunately some good things come to an end, and REUTERS decided to shut down the Palo Alto campus, so it was time to move on.

eBay (2003-2005)

It was now the height of the 2000 dot com tech wreck and it was wreaking havoc in the industry, however I was fortunate to have a shot at a new team being formed at eBay called Knowledge Management. After four rounds of interviews against 15+ candidates, I was able to seal the deal.

It was a similar mission that I had at TIBCO/REUTERS, which was to build out an internal portal/CMS that would facilitate the capture of valuable unstructured tribal/institutional knowledge that existed within the minds of the staff into some searchable and structured form.

Leveraging the experience from REUTERS, accomplishing this goal was fairly straight forward, and we built a number of customized ColdFusion based portlets for various teams and to capture the types of knowledge they possessed.

However I was not satisfied with the user experience of certain web applications that required working with complex sets of information and/or workflows. JavaScript toolkits like jQuery didn’t exist yet, so to do complex HTML DOM manipulation and CSS transformations just wasn’t worth it.

So I began to research other options. I quickly dismissed Java Applets due to their poor user experience, and Flash seemed to have potential but as developer working with a tool optimized for designers was awkward and cumbersome. That’s when I came across Adobe Flex V1.0 and fell in love with that.

Flex allowed me to created these rich user friendly experiences with fairly minimal effort, and I was such a believer in it’s ability to help developers deliver great user experiences that I wrote two books on the topic (Flex 3 In Action, and Flex 4 In Action). Flex had a good run, with Microsoft Silverlight as the main competition, but as we know with the rise of mobile computing JavaScript/HTML5 became the prominent UI platform fueled by frameworks like Angular and React.

Old Republic Home Protection (2005-2014)

After eBay I then moved onto Old Republic Home Protection (ORHP), where the focus was the management of ORHP’s I.T infrastructure (storage, network, private cloud, security, email), and the on-going evolution of their custom developed enterprise CRM software (aimed specifically for the home warranty domain).

The biggest reason for joining ORHP was the opportunity to really make a difference – being relatively smaller than prior experiences, each individual played a very impactful role.  As well, career wise, it allowed me to round out my non technical skills in the areas of client engagement, project management, management, and leadership.

During my time here I’ve introduced and switched our customer’s project management methodology over to Agile/Scrum, and became a Certified ScrumMaster in the process.

Technology wise we used a mixed bag of SQL Server, ColdFusion, Flex, HTML5/CSS3/AngularJS, Java, Groovy/Grails.

 

Teletrac Navman (2014 – Current)

Loved my experience at ORHP, and really proud of the accomplishments we as a team had made, but after 9 years I felt it was time to tackle a new challenge in order to keep growing. And as such, moved on to Teletrac Navman (TN) as the Director of Software Engineering.

The scale at which we’re operating at is incredible:

  • 600,000 assets (vehicles, trailers, fixed assets)
  • 10’s of millions of IoT events processed each day
  • 9 Development locations around the globe

My major efforts have been focused on the deployment and maturation of Agile at scale, and building a world class engineering team to go along with it. The level of talent within the team is incredible, and every hire we’ve made has been to surgically craft and evolve our R&D organization. And we’ve been fortunate to have discovered some really amazing people that made a profound impact to our capabilities, practices, and technology.

A key benefit to TN is that we’re a subsidiary of FORTIVE ($7B in revenue), and being a part of that ecosystem has allowed me to both learn and share learnings at various internal conferences.