Casey Kolderup
About Me
Hi! I'm Casey Kolderup. I live in Portland, OR, USA. I'm a software developer, a music lover, and a fan of art that can fit a mystery or a puzzle into it. I like making things, writing, and trying out new restaurants. I have a deep love for the 1996 film Big Night, the Super Nintendo game Earthbound, and the songs of Jason Molina.
I'm also... looking for full-time work! (pulls a big lever labeled ACTIVATE HIRE ME MODE)
Hire Me
I've been working in software, mostly web, development since the mid-2000s. Most recently, I wrapped up a four-year stint as a Staff Engineer and team lead on Glitch, the platform where everyone built the web, at Fastly. Before that I got to work with great people at places like Discogs and Vox Media. I've helped build great products, led teams of engineers, built and maintained public and private APIs, and overall have been very lucky to work with people who motivated me to:
- do quality work
- pull off fun tricks
- constantly develop my skills and others'
- speak up for what's right for my teammates and our users
I live in Portland, OR but have worked remotely from my home office in a few different places in the US since 2014. I'm ready and happy to travel regularly to visit remote offices or go to events. I would also be open to negotiating a hybrid work situation in the PDX area.
I like a good technical challenge but I'm of the opinion that the best work I do is the time spent collaborating with product managers, designers, user researchers, and other engineers to make sure we all actually understand the work that we're doing. I think that ensuring this starting point, and then rigorously working through a process that translates that understanding into useful changes, is a solid path to good work that is increasingly being forgotten. Trying to take shortcuts or avoiding the work of understanding is the most common path to high-churn, high-incident, discouraging work.
I hope there's always some amount of code-related work in my job but the times that I have found the most success I have had a lot of other responsibilities that, in my mind, have to come first: communicating, writing, arguing (respectfully!), presenting, thinking about team structure and processes, and building community among teammates and across teams within a business or partnership. I think if you sacrifice these things, the output of the coding work will either suffer or be limited in its impact.
I want to give your team what it needs: the vibe-improver, the engineer who will actually attend your meetings, the green-field prototyper, the legacy bug hunter that documents what I find along the way, the calm and confident incident manager. I want to help you make the right decisions that will help you today and also avoid a lot of pain six months from now.