The Dream Team
The Finest Engineering Team in Tri-Cities, WA
With the job search intensifying for myself and my former team from LiveTiles, I find myself reflecting daily on the amazing luck I had to find my Dream Team. Whether through the serendipity of the local community or something as mundane as recruiting efforts on LinkedIn, every single one of my former comrades were stellar performers — and good friends.
We now find ourselves rummaging through the trove of opportunities in a downturn economy — some with vigor and some with fear. To express my gratitude, and perhaps help make a connection, I would like to introduce my teammates to the world.
Trey Miller
Trey Miller, Senior Software Engineer, joined the Tri-Cities office on day one with self-taught experience in development. We sat down in our first week to learn SharePoint development with admittedly zero clue between us. In the intervening 5 years, Trey has mastered not only Office 365, but Typescript and React, with time in the back-end in C# and .Net. On the leadership front, he went from my apprentice to leading a pod of his own as they tackled features for our core products reaching hundreds of thousands of users every month.
Joel Rieck
Joel Rieck, Product Manager, joined as a QA Analyst in 2016 where he brought reliability and sanity to the release process. In time, Joel started collaborating more and more across the business, ultimately earning a promotion — the only clear-cut promotion I saw in the product team in my time at LiveTiles — to product manager. We worked together on technical due diligence of the 50 million dollar acquisition of Wizdom.
Miyuki Gimera
Miyuki Gimera, Senior Software Engineer, came aboard in 2016 to take over the burgeoning SaaS platform for LiveTiles Cloud. Equally adept at C#, SQL, and taming Azure infrastructure, Miyuki was indispensable not just completing the project, but taking over as its primary steward to this day. With over 1,400 site deployments from China to Europe, Miyuki is the hardest working lynchpin of a team I’ve ever seen.
Kellan Corbitt
Kellan Corbitt, Software Engineer, joined in 2018 to bolster the SaaS platform with another full stack developer. Moving between front and back-end, Kellan accomplished key innovations like integration with Azure Cognitive Search — making Cloud an AI-powered product — and re-architecture like splitting our front-end monolith into NPM packages. Kellan had approached me long before his joining or LiveTiles, showing a goto spirit. He also has an entrepreneurial venture on the side, Trutik, which aims to reshape logistics with cloud technology.
Liz Cole
Liz Cole, Senior Product Designer, arrived in 2018 and immediately set about not just making mockups, but redefining the creative process for our team. Harnessing the Design Sprint, she created unity across user experience concerns and developer know-how, creating commitment in the team through collaboration. Empowered by her eye for design and insight with the customer, we had our most impactful 2 years in delivering usability to the enterprise.
Cassandra Lamendola
Cassandra Lamendola, Software Engineer, met the team in 2018. Trained at Lambda School, Cass was primarily self-taught, though you would never know. From wowing in the interview with knowledge of web security through to picking up Typescript at rapid speed, Cass is one of the best growth stories at LiveTiles. Spinning up from her first professional role to being invaluable in delivering new tiles and canvas capabilities in a short order testify to her immense abilities.
Art McBain
Art McBain, Senior Software Engineer, moved over from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2018. Focused on the front-end, Art delivered feature after feature in elegant Typescript and React integrating with SharePoint and Azure back-ends. Most of the time, this was novel tiles to put deeper capabilities into the platform. Also a leader in the Tri-Cities community, Art is one of the backers of Confluent Space in Richland, the only maker space in Tri-Cities.
Gwyn de Groof
Gwyn de Groof, High School Intern, came to us as the last work-based-learning student from Delta High School — the local STEM secondary school. Interested in both art and coding, Gwyn spent most of her time focused on learning core web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) while under the tutelage of Cass. This enabled coaching amongst the team while Gwyn absorbed valuable job skills. Internships during the pandemic meant she had a lot of independence to work from home near the end and she didn’t slack.
Michelle Chapin
Michelle Chapin, Quality Assurance Analyst, passed through the likes of Nintendo and Microsoft before arriving at LiveTiles. Jumping into the process to keep our customers safe from bugs, Michelle demonstrated a disciplined approach and an easy-going attitude. While we had precious little time to collaborate before COVID-19 and the downturn, Michelle’s support of the team was extraordinary and I am confident she will find a place to call professional home.
What’s Next?
Since the announcement of our office closing 3 weeks ago, we’ve emptied an office, buffed up our resumes, and hit the trail trying to find our next adventures. We keep in touch over Discord where we share job postings, interview excitement, and (hopefully more soon) details on job offers. I’ve never worked with so many talented people and it was my greatest honor to hand-select them. We delivered to over a thousand customer organizations, encompassing some of the biggest brands in the world — Pepsi, Estee Lauder, Walgreens, and so many more. I believe each of us will find bigger and better opportunities to make our own dreams teams.
Erik Ralston is an innovator with 13 years of experience, 5 years in leadership at the fastest growing tech company in Australia, a BS in Computer Science from Washington State University, and an open calendar for talking about the next step in his career. Erik is also co-founder of Fuse Accelerator in Tri-Cities, WA where he works on connecting people and sharing knowledge to turn new ideas into growing startups. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or the next Fuse event — whenever we’re allowed to have those again.
