Julian A. Dockhorn

About Julian A. Dockhorn

I engage stakeholders, implement solutions, and find ways to do even better next time around. I\'m just as comfortable being a team lead, or teammate. I envision, strategize, plan, and execute. I\'m an experienced software developer, working in groups and solo. I\'m great with learning new languages, tools, and environments. I\'m most at-home doing full-stack development, but a little stronger on the back-end, infrastructure, and automation parts of the work. I\'ve also worked as a designer/developer unicorn, rolling design and development into a one-person package. As a team leader I engage my colleagues to make sure they\'re getting what they need while business priorities are being handled. My priority is making sure we quickly and accurately learn what\'s important, and what isn\'t. When supporting others\' leadership, I bring energy and creativity to addressing the needs of all stakeholders. And when I\'m a team of one, I switch easily between the mindsets of a product owner, UX designer, and developer. I\'ve led colleagues through learning Agile methods, and left them strong enough in their skills that they\'re now teaching others. I design retrospectives to draw out creative solutions to unaddressed problems. I facilitate decisionmaking to ensure ownership by everyone involved. I don\'t limit my change leadership to the software process. For example, I researched and recommend improvements to the creation of my division\'s principal product, a package of research and recommendations to the policy-setting Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Most of my suggestions were implemented, resulting in a faster, leaner process that focuses on top issues and leaves participants more energized and productive. I love better processes (e.g. small iterations, user-centered design) and shared practices (e.g. automated testing, CI/CD) that enhance what we build together, and how the team works together as people. I take joy in fixing intricate, loathsomely tedious problems deep in systems built by teams that only have this one annoying bug, and I feel especially successful when I leave both the system and the team healthier when I\'m done. I\'m passionate about collaborative work environments, balancing work quality with speed, and keeping both the long view and the short view in mind. My main field is software development, and I also practice UX design, instructional design, and facilitation.

Experience

1. Founder CTO

   Versatackle

   Jan 2020 — Present

   Built a Software As A Service (SaaS) startup from the ground up, partnering with an MBA to create a platform for online events prioritizing accessibility, equity, consent, and privacy. Hired and developed a team using evidence-based and experimental people practices, leading to a fully distributed team, with 86% of team members identifying as a race, gender, and/or sexual orientation underrepresented in technology companies. Integrated AssemblyAI for closed captions with Twilio Programmable Video WebRTC rooms on a stack including Ruby on Rails, NPM (Node Package Manager), jQuery, Redis, Passenger, Apache, and NGINX. Selected vendor and infrastructure providers based on privacy, ethical, and technological compatibility with company priorities for our brand identity and user experience.

Education

• Oberlin College

  B.A., Computer Science