As a Senior Developer at Venn, Chad's day is full of developing new integrations, peer reviews, and sipping on french press coffee to crank through lines of code.
How do you start your day?
My day always starts with coffee, emails, and Slack messages. As soon as I'm done with housekeeping stuff, I look at a list of tasks I've categorized by priority and set time to work on them. As a senior developer, I also carve out about 30 minutes to an hour for peer reviews. This encompasses checking code built by our team before it’s transitioned into its live environment.
What is the primary responsibility of a Senior Developer at Venn?
My focus as a senior developer is to help our technical consultants build integrations more efficiently. I get to alleviate some of the heavy lifting for building integrations, freeing our team to deliver solutions faster.
As Venn continues to grow, I get to work on the development of new integrations—like CSV to Sage Intacct general ledger (GL) Batches and Salesforce CPQ to Sage Intacct. This aspect of being a developer at Venn is unique because we get to work with different applications and need to understand how people use them.
“As a senior developer, I look at myself as a resource on our team. I know a lot of people like to figure things out on their own, but I like to be open and willing to help.”
What experience did you have prior to joining Venn?
Years before joining Venn, I was a sales engineer selling microscopes to research labs. As I started to become more involved in the technical side of the business, it helped me learn what I enjoy the most: helping others solve problems. This led me to go down the path of becoming a developer—attending my first boot camp and landing a development job shortly after.
“When I started my first developer job, I knew nothing about Ruby on Rails. I learned it on the job and got put into the deep end pretty quickly.”
With this being a fully remote role, I had to face the unknown head-on, and for the most part, on my own. After five years, I ended up building a lot of really cool stuff as a full-stack developer. Our team went from being a skeleton crew with little project management resources, no dedicated UX, and no dedicated QA. By the time I left, we had all of those things and solid processes. Seeing things being built from the ground up was rewarding, and that’s what I’m hoping to do here at Venn as well.
What do you like about your role?
I enjoy a challenge, and since we're a small team, it's been fun building out processes and working on projects that’ll help us as we scale. It feels like we're heading in the right direction. Ultimately, being a developer at Venn feels unique because we get to learn about a variety of SaaS tools and how our clients are using them.
What's your favorite thing about working at Venn?
I really enjoy being back in the office. My last role was remote for five years, so starting a new role in-office has been really nice. Venn does a great job at planning team building activities, and with a team this size, it’s really easy to get to know one another.
“We have a very collaborative environment here. There’s been a lot of good conversations around the projects we're working on and our personal lives in general. I’m thankful to have a good rapport with the team. And, even though I have a 30-minute commute to work now, it's worth it.”
What advice would you give to someone who’s interested in working at Venn?
I would tell them that working here is going to be hard work, but in a good way. The main issue developers run into, when working at a new company, is learning the domain of applications and the business. You come in knowing how to code, but it takes time to get familiar with things.
Working for a consulting firm like Venn does add some variety to the job. We help other companies integrate their tech stack, and in order to do that, we have to be continuously learning as apps and business processes change.
How do you explain what you do to family and friends?
For my family members or friends who work in accounting, they understand what Venn does pretty quickly. Everyone else understands that as a developer for a company, we build things internally to help the team.
Most people are familiar with Salesforce, but they rarely understand what the integration side of our business is. I typically phrase it as, “We’re in the business of making systems talk to each other, moving data between them, and making things easier for people using those systems.”
What do you do for fun outside of work?
My wife and I love to travel when we can. I also enjoy playing golf on the weekends with friends. As an Oklahoma State graduate, I usually have season tickets for football every fall. Although OSU is only about a four hour drive from DFW, I do have a pilot friend who gives us a ride there sometimes. I’m an Eagle scout, so I’ve done a lot of backpacking through national parks like Zion and the Grand Canyon.
Outside of work, Chad enjoys traveling, golfing, backpacking, and attending Oklahoma State University football games.
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