In May, we welcomed Andrew Gorman to the Lean Tech family for the summer. Andrew has contributed a lot to this team with really taking lead in helping us solidify our software development process. We asked Andrew to answer a few questions so that Thrive users could know a little more about him and his contributions to the platform this summer.

1. Tell us about yourself, where are you from/what are you studying?

I am Andrew Gorman, a Computer Science and Psychology double major at Central College, and I’m heading into my senior year! I grew up on a farm in Altoona, IA, and have always had a passion for computers and coding. Some other passions of mine include: photography, drones, and graphic design.

2. What originally attracted you to working at LeanTech? How did you hear about the opportunity?

One of my best friends, D.J. Imoehl, had a summer internship at Lean Tech during the summer of ’17. In talking with D.J. about his summer internship upon returning to school, he had nothing but positive experiences to share. He loved the team, the lean focus, and the small team environment. He put me in contact with the Team as he knew I would enjoy it as much as he did.

3. What do you like most about Lean Tech? How do you like working for a small software shop vs. a large corporation?

I love the agility, focus, and interaction that a small team brings to the table. In larger companies, oftentimes teams are larger and you don’t have as much of a voice. That’s not the case at Lean Tech, here everyone has a voice, and everyone is encouraged to share their opinions and ideas regularly. When it comes to projects, often developers are distanced from the customers and distanced from really being able to understand how to best design their software. At Lean Tech we regularly interact with customers and as a result, I believe our software is all the better for it. Saving the best for last, my favorite part of being on a small team that regularly interacts with customers is being able to identify ways to streamline the process and workflow for customers, without the customer ever even having to request it.

4. What are some projects you worked on this summer?

This summer I have completed many projects, but two in particular stand out to me as ones that I am exceptionally proud of. Both of these are projects that made me realize how great it was to be a developer on a small team with high customer interaction.
One of our customers was regularly exporting large data sets using Thrive, and although our export functionality is very robust, it was still taking a few minutes for Thrive to be able to communicate with the customer’s servers and compile the data, then download it. I was able to dig into the code for the export process and develop a new method for exporting large data sets that was much more efficient and streamlined, now that same download happens almost instantly. The time savings for our customers not having to wait means employees can be more productive with their time. This feature was rolled out to customers in our June 2018 update.

My second project was a modification to the Goalboards. In speaking with customers, I found that several companies use tablets running the Thrive Goalboard system at each part station for productivity tracking. While Thrive supports mobile devices site wide, the Goalboard buttons were a slightly difficult to click when operators were wearing gloves or other protective equipment. I modified Goalboards to detect when they were being run on mobile devices and dynamically resize the productivity tracking buttons to ensure that it was as easy and quick as possible for operators to track their productivity.

5. Whats your personal developer motto?

“Software should always be a tool, never an obstacle to be overcome.”

Yet another reason I love Lean Tech, every single member of the team embodies and embraces this value more than any other software development company I know of.