Ron Crocker

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT RON CROCKER

I prefer to describe my job by what I\'m expected to do: I\'m expected to be a technical leader. I lead both by example and by encouragement (which can take several forms, from subtle to substantially less so). I just started a new role at a very exciting company: New Relic. I\'m a Distinguished Engineer, a pretty senior technical position in a team of very technical developers at a shop that\'s a developer\'s dream. The culture is exactly what it should be - all about delivering high quality software quickly. BTW, they have openings. My particular focus is related to making people-oriented applications work well, and do so by proposing (often novel) solutions to a variety of problems. That\'s reflected by 30+ issued US Patents (I\'ve listed only a few). In theory I\'m writing a book on Large-Scale Agile Software Development, but it\'s going I have good results using the approach for over 15 years. Further, I have a handful of good presentations on the topic (at tutorial length as well as at executive overview length and can customize it to anything in between), but the book is not ready [yet]. I was General Chair for OOPSLA 2003 but that was a long time ago (now). I still write code when I\'m allowed to, enabled by my abstraction skills. I\'m able to coach my team on how to do that also, but abstraction skills are much like art skills - people have them naturally OR they have to work very hard to do the same. I can\'t draw (stretching the analogy) and when I try to draw it\'s, uhh, hideous. I can see order and structure though. I can take that order and structure and extend it into code. Specialties: Large distributed team leadership, shipping on time-on budget-high quality systems, innovation.