Charles Garrett

Background

About

I was born in Chicago but raised in Seattle and my family is spread across the United States, so I've always been accustomed to feeling at home in many distinct places. These days my home is in Barcelona Spain where I work remotely leading a small team of engineers whose headquarters is in Seattle.

Throughout my nearly 10-year career my curiousity has driven me to seek out a variety of projects which challenge my technical abilities and with each small success not only have my technical skills grown, but I have also developed a powerful ability to work smart and efficiently. I believe this ability has been key to my success in working remotely and leading a distributed team.

My interests are as varied as the places that I call home and lately I have been enjoying exploring product ideas in the space of native-ish mobile applications. My non-work pursuits include crossfit, nutrition, snowboarding, olympic weight-lifting, and less meat-head conquests like advancing my conversational Spanish abilities by reading Spanish literature.

Work Experience

Software Engineering Manager, Nuance Communications
Jul, 2013 - Present3 years 7 months
Our Automotive Services group provides in-vehicle, native mobile, custom applications, and infotainment content to automotive manufacturers.
- My role is a combination of Individual Contributor & Team Lead (with two direct reports). I get to spend about 70% of my time designing software and the remaining time mentoring my team, project planning, and providing general technical guidance.
- Advanced our web application code base from its startup roots to a more mature architecture that is easily extensible, maintainable, and testable.
- Lead the architecture & development of web applications with Java and Javascript as the primary code-base.
- Rapidly prototype mobile-optimized web applications to be used in customer demo & sales meetings.
- Evaluate customer requirements & design custom solutions in the form of new applications or modifying legacy code-bases.
- Develop internal tools in the form of web applications or scripts to streamline Dev & QA activities.
Senior Java Web Engineer, Nuance Communications
Jun, 2012 - Jul, 20131 year 1 month
I joined the team as we were striving to grow our customer base by expanding the offerings of our content platform and advancing our application architectures and development practices.
- Lead the integration of 3rd party APIs into our web platforms: Facebook, iHeart Radio, Twitter.
- Guided the development of web applications customized per automotive manufacturer. Built with Spring, Java, JSPs, and SQL.
- Persuaded our team to try some agile practices including bucket-style tracking of outstanding tasks, daily scrums, paired-programming, and producing more product builds with incremental changes.
- Acted as a liaison between technical and non-technical teams; providing guidance (technical planning, design & implementation) on how to accomplish our platform objectives while fulfilling our customer's requests and providing an optimized user experience.
Software Developer, BlackBerry
Jul, 2007 - Jun, 20124 years 11 months
I was at BlackBerry during the peak of its success and as we diversified our product offering as mobile competition increased.
- Developed web (Java, JSP, HTML, Javascript, CSS) and mobile (WML, XSL) applications for our 50+ million BlackBerry subscribers.
- Developed Restful and SOAP services to deliver data and application logic, respectively, to traditional web and native BlackBerry applications.
- Acted as a Build Engineer, leading the design of a Continuous Integration and Test Automation framework using tools such as Team City, Jenkins, Selenium, and Robot Framework.

Skills

Full Stack Web Applications
JavaJavascriptGroovySpring FrameworkApache TomcatNodeJSHTML (Mustache, Handlebars, JSX, JSP)CSS (SCSS)SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
API Development
Restful Web ServicesOAuth & Basic Authentication
Modern Front-End Javascript
ES6Twitter FlightJSReactJSFunctional Programming with Javascript
APIs Integrations
iHeart RadioParkoPediaFacebookTwitterKey/Value Document Stores
Mobile Optimized Web Applications
Hybrid Android Apps with Java & HTMLResponsive & targeted layoutsProgressive Web ApplicationsModular component-oriented Javascript
Tools
Mac OSSeveral flavors of LinuxBash ScriptingJava ScriptingGoogle App EngineHerokuCircleCIJenkinsVirtual Environment Management(Vagrant, Virtual Box, VMWare)Spring FrameworkGradleMavenNPMGulpWebpackSubversionGit

Education

Human Centered Design & Engineering, Master of Science, University of Washington
Jan, 2009 - Jun, 2011
Sociotechnical AnthropologyUser Research
Computer Science & Software Engineering, Bachelor of Science, Seattle University
Jan, 2004 - Jun, 2007
Object Oriented & Algorithmic ProgrammingMathematics Specialization

Interests

Crossfit, Snowboarding, Collecting passport stamps, Diversity, Food

References

Ron Radko - managed Charles at Nuance Communications
'Charles provided the best example of remote team management that I have witnessed. As his manager, with him working in a different timezone than myself and his team, he continued to deliver and keep on top and connected with his team. He provided both inspirational and technical leadership for them. As his manager, I found that Charles was able to keep the balance between keeping me up to date and handling the areas independently. Charles developed feelings of great respect for all who worked with him in both his work style, can do attitude and technical leadership. As an individual contributor he is also highly capable in both technical areas he as experience and digging in to new areas. I would strongly recommend Charles for a technical leadership role or as an individual contributor.'
See LinkedIn for additional references.