Cameron Gorrie
Software architect, problem solver, mentor
Staff developer @ Top Hat. Formerly a mentor / instructor @ Lighthouse Labs, CTO @ Robin Media, dev @ Street Contxt, software team lead @ LyricFind. Techstars Music 2017 alumnus.
I love to learn, and I love solving problems. Get in touch.
How I work
I solve people problems by supporting, mentoring, and enabling my co-workers, as well as by contributing in management capacities through servant leadership. Over my career, I have gained a wealth of experience both in managing dev teams and facilitating communication between different branches of organisations.
I solve tech, product, and usability problems by breaking them down and approaching them from several different perspectives simultaneously. Sometimes it's better to build a quick proof-of-concept or even a landing page to capture interest than to build the new feature outright. Other times, it's a matter of weighing technical debt against the business use case, coming up with the simplest robust design, reducing scope where appropriate, and making sure the team moves forward together while communicating simply (and often asynchronously).
I have used this methodology to successfully deliver many products within reasonable timeframes and budgets, all under various degrees of uncertainty. I believe that there are many correct approaches to building software, and mine is just one of them.
What I'm up to
In April 2019, I joined Top Hat and served the business as a Director of Engineering for three years before transitioning to a Staff role. See my CV for more information about what I've been up to there.
I have been mentoring students at Lighthouse Labs for a few months now, and it has been deeply satisfying witnessing their journeys. There are these moments when their eyes light up and they make a hundred connections at once in their brains about programming and for that brief second it all makes sense. I love that feeling myself, and I love helping others get there.
I am super proud of the work we've done at Robin Media, where I led the development of our initiatives up until September 2018. I also led a 2-year rewrite of the LyricFind backend systems from 2014-2016. I also took on a good amount of the product and project management tasks for these efforts.
Selected projects
| pgsh | postgres tools for local development (github) |
|---|---|
| sendy video | collect video greetings from your friends (github) |
| colleq | social coding in your IDE (wip) |
Miscellaneous
This site was built using Gatsby. While it has its hiccups, I've found it simple to keep up-to-date while providing high performance and accessibility.
Here is an example of my technical writing. In this article, I walk the reader through building a simple stitched GraphQL schema using node.js, PostGraphile, and Stripe.
I have participated in a number of bands as a songwriter, bassist, and/or vocalist. Check out My Favourite Filter on Bandcamp or Seedling on Bandcamp.