Colin FitzGerald

My educational background has very little to do with technology. I have degrees in Psychology and history. I graduated in the middle of a recession and realized my initial plan to get a PhD in history (and barely be able to afford food) was probably not a good future. So I thought to myself: “What allows me to be surrounded by innovation and intelligent folks and interesting problems?” and technology jumped out to me. I was living in Chicago at the time and in need of a job, so I applied for a customer service role in the call center at Groupon. It was immediately clear to me that there was this whole world of technology that I didn't understand. I didn't know really anything about what a website is except it was something you simply visit and do a thing on. The more I got engaged in that platform the more I realized there was stuff to learn—and that has always been the thing that interested me most—stuff to learn. I'm inherently a very curious person, so I started asking questions and slowly moved into more and more technical roles. I went from customer service rep to join a fledgling quality support group, then ultimately helped build the quality organizations first run there. It was really neat.

‍

After a couple years there I left to join a very small startup, about 20 people total. The engineering product and design team was a grand total of about six. That was the first time I got to build something unilaterally and it was a quality team. At first it was just a team of myself, but I eventually got to hire some folks and build the processes out. Because of the nature and size of the company, I was exposed to more problems and depth with regards to our infrastructure and the systems that build our websites. It was yet another chapter I got to read in “What is technology and how does it all work?” At that point, I got tired of Chicago winters and decided to move back west where I’m from. I looked at the places I wanted to live and ruled out the ones I couldn't afford, then checked out what companies were where. I ended up taking an opportunity to work for a company called Simple. It was an online back, which was a new space that was on its way up. It was really interesting and I got to build the quality team there also, so I have this recurring theme of joining smaller companies and building these teams. I've enjoyed that quite a bit and as I progressed through my career. I worked at Simple for several years and then a couple more startups.

‍

Eventually I joined Webflow with the same ultimate goal: build a quality group and get the ball rolling on how we think about unification of quality—like the tools, the processes, that kind of thing. What I realized as I was performing this role over and over at a variety of places is that quality has a lot to do with not just the people on the team and the tools you're using, but the way an organization approaches it. You can only do so much on your own. You really need organizational buy-in to make things happen, and a big aspect of quality is how you react when things go badly. The ideal is to never have that happen but the reality is that's unattainable, and so the incident space was this side project that I had worked on repeatedly throughout the years. As Webflow began to scale, incident management became more and more important, so rather than having it be a side project, the choice was made to make it a full-time job and I moved into that role.

‍

If you’re like me and you didn't have an enormous amount of exposure to it, and you didn't have any formal education in it, you have to be very hungry. I spent my commute every single day—45 minutes each way—practicing and learning and cramming everything I could into my brain and then using all my spare time at work putting it into practice, asking questions and peeling back the next layer and then and the next layer. It's really about making an opportunity to show up for yourself. Those opportunities typically happen more frequently in smaller to mid-stage companies that are growing quickly. So, I would advise people to be very hungry and learn absolutely everything you can, and then take a bit of a risk and join those smaller companies. You're not sure where they're going, but they are growing quickly enough that there's a better chance you can move into something that's more and more technical over time.

‍

I work from home and I have an office room set up. We have an extra bedroom that is devoted specifically to the space, which is nice. So I have a door I can close right there. It's marvelous. We have three dogs so the morning routine involves me being woken up, usually by my chihuahua jumping on me and demanding to go outside. So I'll deal with the dogs, let them out, and give them food. Then typically I’ll make myself a small breakfast and clean up after any dishes left, and then it's coffee time. The coffee machine is running while I'm doing those things, so when I’m done I get to pour myself an enormous cup of black coffee and that usually gets my mind going enough that I can sit down on my computer and actually read things and make sense of them in my head.

‍

Honestly, I thrive in the stress. A number of my family members work in the medical field. My sister is a trauma nurse. I think there's something in the water where I grew up that makes that a thing that we like. But for those times where it does bubble over, I’ll get outside and take the dogs for a walk. That’s if the weather is good. I live in the Pacific Northwest, so the weather is only sometimes good. There's relatively easy access to nature and that helps reset me. If the weather is not good, I'll spend time in the garage. I like building things out of wood, so I give that a shot. None of them are particularly good but it's a great way to burn off some stress and focus on a completely different kind of problem where I can step away from a computer and focus on making a precision cut or sanding something into oblivion.

‍

In two words: abject chaos. To be a little more descriptive: dropped production database.

‍