🤿 Ken Mayer Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Individual contributor at premier Agile consultancy in San Francisco. My secret sauce is to teach clients Agile development all the while building excellent software. In addition, I contributed internally where I saw needs and opportunities: Built a laptop configuration tool to cut down on staff on-boarding time (we reset our laptops between every project). Updated C5’s “best practices template” for Ruby on Rails projects.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Within the first month, turned a site that was buggy that sales could not run demos into something stable and responsive. During the first year, we tripled the government sites that we supported. Innovated on a seemingly simple idea that has grown the company from practically $0 revenue to $1mm ARR. Built our reputation as the most stable, most reliable, most responsible product in our space. Every time we’ve faced a scalability challenge, our costs go down! I’ve built a small, productive, loyal engineering team that spans time zones. They care about the product, and for each other. We have a culture of sharing our learnings that makes us better each day. I have a regular cadence of 1-on-1s that allow for free and open dialog, even on painful topics.

Responsible for all engineering, front-end and back-end. Improved our code quality from 'F' to 'C'. This reduced crashes and data loss. I cut server costs in half and then half again by reducing technical debt. That also led to a reduction in our CX and operations costs. At the same time API response time was cut in half from an average 250 to 125ms. Lead the team through two company pivots, requiring large scale changes in the running product. The second pivot required deploying a completely independent, HIPAA-compliant back end that integrated with the existing commercial app, in less than 90 days from the first design meeting to production. There were no death marches or all-nighters.

San Francisco, California, Us

Full-stack, hands-on, engineer: Built web sites for clients using best practices of Test Driven Design, Agile and XP methodologies.Technical leader: Ran stand-ups, planning meetings and retrospectives. Selected programming pairs so that the team shares a common vision of the product. Guided team to pragmatically choose technologies that get the job done. Regularly encourage or scheduled training where necessary. Provided feedback both verbal and written to continuously improve the team. Maintained focus on getting the most important thing done first and done right.Manager: Coached engineers to achieve the "next level" in technical, process and leadership skills. Reduced turnover by offering a work experience that can not be repeated elsewhere. Screened and interviewed engineering candidates from entry-level to CTO.Released into production, from inception through green field to minimum viable product, often working closely with designers on developing a unique, branded UX.Taught client teams how to run an agile engineering team such that when the engagement was over, the team continues to use best practices.Rescued troubled legacy code bases that were poorly tested, badly designed, and slow, into performant, reliable and flexible software that responds easily to changing business needs.Using remote screen sharing, virtual presence and out-of-band channels, guided geographically remote teams so that they work together as a cohesive unit.

San Francisco, California, Us

tl;dr Turned an 18 month sabbatical into a 6 year adventure. Re-entered software engineering in 2007. Hired by Pivotal Labs three years later.Certified PADI Instructor, Licensed ship captain, CPR/First Aid InstructorTaught classes, sold gear, led charters, drove the boat, managed staff. Not your everyday tech job, but it requires skills across many disciplines: physics, physiology, marine biology, meteorology, machinist, web developer, database developer, business owner, personnel management, marketing, sales, education, psychology, and a whole bunch of "people skills"; A two-year tour living and sailing aboard my 40-foot sloop. I travelled more than 10,000 nautical miles, most of it double-handed or solo.I had a network of laptops on board to maintain my web site (before the term "blog" was common). During this period I did occasional consulting work for Silicon Valley companies such as Synopsys and Yahoo!