Wayne Stidolph
Software architect and leader

View Wayne Stidolph's profile on LinkedIn

My History
My blog
Building software and building teams

My Style

... as an executive/manager

My 'bias to action' leads me to prefer and succeed with fast-paced projects. I have a fairly high risk/repair tolerance; I expect the best efforts from talented people but stay cheerful when we have to adapt

My communications style is very open - I keep my boss and colleagues unsurprised. For reporting, although I 'grew up' in a rather formal company, I have come to admire the crisp One Page approach

My fundamental style is to respect the company, believe I succeed when the company succeeds ... so, no power games and no hurt feelings

... as a group leader

Try to be a person that great engineers will want to work around; embody the values and vision the team needs, and keep the vision crisply focused by frequently realigning to the business goals and context.

Encourage the team to be self-directing in design and implementation, by delegating real influence on the product and authority over implementation. Ensure we measure and internally report on progress, failure, and quality. Stay cross-trained and team-integrated by mixing up the mini-teams and the work areas, getting everyone to reach a bit outside the comfort zone.

Review, discuss, arbitrate, and "break ties" - but seldom override.

Applaud momentum and delivery.

... as an engineer

My in-team style is to be the technical generalist - I hope to be the "second smartest guy" in the room on a lot of technical topics! I enjoy thrashing out requirements and solutions at the whiteboard.

As a designer/architect I lean towards Domain Driven Design, with heavily modularized and asynchronous implementations.

When it comes to the coding I generally prefer to work alone then do reviews and integrations. I have a tendency towards object-oriented paradigms, usually in the Java ecosystem, but I use other languages and models when they are a better fit to the problem or the context.

My Skills

  • Recruit and inspire a tech team (done it for big companies, and multiple startups)
  • Guide a team to deal with multiple forces (user needs/wants, cost of development and ownership, company culture goals, etc)
  • Coach/mentor and do structured teaching
  • Maintain situational awareness of leading software trends, technologies, and tools
  • Organize/improve development process
  • Manage technical development (either as direct manager or using inter-team influence)
  • Drive a product architecture (define, evangelize, track, adapt)
  • Write specs for business/technical applications and services (research, negotiate and capture requirements)
  • Program at journeyman-level
  • Set up and execute software/systems quality evaluations (usually for middleware, with TCO/LCC emphasis)
This jargony wall of text is mainly to make search engines happy.
  • Main Exposure: distributed applications design (partitioning behaviour and data, queueing, reliability monitor, etc); OO and component-based design,  requirements engineering,  software development metrics, software structural review, code review
  • Adequate: non-specialist skills in bash, git, svn, HTML, Java technologies, Groovy/Grails, XML family, RDF, UML and some similar notations, C, generalized security, DB concepts (relational and OO), functional/structured design, mainstream user interaction design and evolution, effort estimation, and  lightweight software development processes (e.g., SCRUM).
  • Limited: JavaScript, CSS3, Ruby on Rails, (rusty) skills in other computer languages (assembly, C++, awk, perl, ...); non-procedural paradigms (FP, Prolog, SQL); OS-specific programming (Window/Linux/, device drivers); signal processing; information warfare; embedded programming/debugging
  • Now Studying: mobile application and UI/UX design (Android), HTML5/CSS3 and more JavaScript

Quotes from LinkedIn recommendations

History

For details, see my 2-page resume (PDF) and check out my LinkedIn profile

Here's an overview:

Readings

You know a lot about someone from what they read:


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Stidolph Software Engineering last update 2012/02/29