Why I'm jumping on the LaunchNotes rocket 🚀

Hi there! 👋🏼

I'm Greg and I'm the newest member of the LaunchNotes Engineering team. Really excited to be here!

My circuitous journey into software

Similar to a number of my LaunchNotes colleagues, I took a less traveled path into software engineering. After college I spent six years working on the track and field staff at NC State University, worked primarily with long distance runners. As a former collegiate distance runner myself, I loved the running world and the opportunity to continue helping college athletes grow as both athletes and people. However, I increasingly felt the itch to find a different challenge (not to mention have a free weekend or two every once in a while 😅).

While building a website for a high school running camp we operated, I found myself wanting to know how things were built under the hood. That spark led me to take an introductory computer science class, which in turn gave me the confidence to take an even bigger plunge. So, in early 2018 I moved to San Francisco to attend a coding bootcamp and haven't looked back since.

Following the bootcamp I was fortunate enough to get hired by Atlassian to work on the Statuspage team. It was there I got the chance to work with Tyler and some other current members of the LaunchNotes crew. Over the next three years I moved from Statuspage to help engineer a new internal product that Atlassian was building from the ground up. That experience gave me a bit of a taste of what it's like to be a part of a product early on, and the related opportunities and excitement surrounding being first in a particular space.

Why LaunchNotes?

I always knew at some point I wanted to have the experience of working at an early stage startup. The key for me was finding a place that had the right intersection of people, product, and principles. Working somewhere with people I wasn’t excited to collaborate with or building something I didn’t believe in wasn’t going to be a recipe for success. However, at LaunchNotes I've found all three.

People → Knowing some of the people here made checking off the people box easy. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing one of our engineers, Matt, since our days running track together in high school. I got the chance to know Tyler during our time at Atlassian. Whether I know them from a professional or personal setting, I know the people at LaunchNotes are talented, customer focused, and folks that want to build something great... while enjoying the process of doing so. They are people I am not only excited to soak up knowledge from, but also people I'm excited to interact with on a daily basis.

Product → I’ve seen the pain experienced from product teams on changes not being effectively communicated upstream from development teams. Having worked on products built by multiple teams, distributed across multiple geographic regions, and working autonomously to deliver as fast as possible, I've seen firsthand that such conditions often make for a very frustrating customer experience. Time spent trying to figure out “what changed” since logging off the previous day is wasteful and frustrating. A new feature to a product, be it internal or external, is only as successful as how that change is communicated and received.

Principles → The team here believes in an intense customer focused mindset. They believe the focus should always be on creating customer value, loyalty, and trust above all. This has become more and more important in an increasingly distributed work environment. I was also drawn to the commitment here to enjoy the process. The LaunchNotes team loves to celebrate the wins along the journey to building something great.

What I do away from the keyboard

My partner and I recently moved from San Francisco to L.A. for her to pursue a PhD. While she’s been diligently studying, I’ve been diligently exploring roadside taco stands and jumping aboard the Dodgers and LAFC bandwagons. Like many members of the LaunchNotes team, I share a passion for the outdoors, be it running, skiing, biking, or continually trying and failing at surfing.

Unlike many of the folks here I do not yet have a dog to litter my introductory blog post with, but hope to change that in the coming months!

Join us! 🚀

If LaunchNotes sounds like a team you want to be a part of, you are in luck because we're hiring for a number of roles across R&D!

Check out our careers page for more info, or reach out to my directly at gdame@launchnotes.io.