Building Better Mousetraps

All those great user experiences require a team to build them. Enter the few, the proud, the possibly-insane-but-we're-willing-to-overlook-that: the engineers.

Our engineers are a special lot, encompassing a wide range of skills, but drawn together by the communal pursuit of excellence and bug-free code that behaves as expected. Java, C, Perl, UNIX, gargantuan databases, and a vast arsenal of bewildering technical jargon are their weaponry; midnight inspiration is their muse; and "We can make it better! We have the technology!" is their battle cry.

Long may ye be victorious, oh brave and noble Engineering group!

 

Who's in the group:

Director, Engineering Group (Judith Gilbert)
Coordinates the entire engineering group, from making sure they have adequate resources to introducing new technologies, arranging outings and training, developing strategic relationships with software vendors, and running the weekly engineering meeting.

Tech Leads + Software Engineers (Christian Mogensen, Fred Crimi, Jake Donham, Nat Johnson, Topher LaFata, Zachary Smith)
Engineers build tools; all sorts of nifty tools, in C and Java and SQL and Perl. And they have meetings about building tools. And they write specs that describe the tools they're going to build. And they have meetings to discuss the specs that describe the tools they're going to build. But mostly, they just build tools. (In a way, they're kind of like elves. We leave out a requirements document and a plateful of cookies before we go home at night, and when we return the next morning the code is finished and the cookies are gone. Along with all the beer in the fridge.)

Build{Master, Mistress} + Web{Master, Mistress} (Alison Hill, Chuck Gathard, Drue Miller, Kevin John Black, Victor Barclay)
Like enologists trained at the hands of old masters, these folks write CGI scripts and craft HTML according to vivid's rigorous standards.

QA Lead + QA Engineers + QA Testers (Jennifer Carson, Ken Stockwell, Rich Morrow, Sydnie Nugent)
More powerful than a Shell No-Pest Strip and a can of Black Flag, the Quality Assurance team is vivid's best defense in the war on bugs. No product is released before its gone through the stringent testing trials of this team, which not only finds bugs and reports them to the responsible perpetrator(s), but then goes back to verify that the bug has been eradicated! (How's that for thorough?) In addition to coordinating her team, the QA Lead creates testing plans and databases for tracking the little buggers, develops tools for better QA procedures, and raises office standards overall.

Technical Writing Director (Maggie Powers)
Part literary style maven, part insomniac nerdling with matching shoes and purse, the Tech Writing Director is the ultimate in user interfaces. A veritable Margaret Mead among the geeks, she fastidiously studies their grotesque, multi-tentacled software beasts and produces smart, savvy documentation for clients and others on the project team. Her foofier-but-far-less-fashionable counterpart, the Creative Writing Director, runs with the savages in the Experience Group.

Systems + Network Administrators (Kelli Mitchell, Paul Guth)
Woe to the sysadmins: unsung heroes of the corporate world, acknowledged in times of need yet ignored when accolades are given out, they nonetheless persevere, toiling in the background to keep the machinery humming away while others step forward into the limelight. vivid's sysadmins are responsible for installing and configuring new hardware and software; maintaining the network and servers; coming up with insightful answers to user questions like, "Did you try rebuilding your desktop?" Or, "I think there's a manpage about that..."; not yelling at the rest of us when we forget our passwords; playing networked Doom with the rest of the engineers; and making backups (um, you guys did  remember to make backups, right?)

Where they go:

Like the Experience Group, the Engineering Group conducts its share of offsite research:

Future outings include experiments in viscosity and fermentation rates at Brew City.

Know of a place the engineers should go? Tell 'em about it!

Meet the rest of the teams:

 


  
Home | Search | Feedback
  | Projects + Vision |
  vividians 

  Form + Function | PR
  | Culture Shock | Vivid Travel Network