Gary Brown

“A major part of what brings me joy in my career is a passion for what all of us do. If I would describe Gary in one word, it would be "passion". He is incredibly passionate about architectural design, passionate when asking the right questions (with healthy skepticism), and passionate about his organization and elevating others with knowledge and experience. When involved in enterprise software architecture, engineering and design, you must search for a solution suited to solve the problem at hand. With that solution, you must balance performance, scalability and complexity. Gary is able to take these critical, often competing, requirements and combine them elegantly with all other components like licensing costs, speed of development, resources, whether to build or buy, and partner integrations to deliver an outstanding architecture. The final result is a solution that not only solves the current problem, but is flexible, robust and maintainable for years to come. Having gone through various major architectural redesigns and restructures in my career, Gary is no stranger to dealing with legacy technologies and decisions. One of Gary's strengths is his ability to step back and look at the bigger picture. He has an uncanny drive to take assumptions that have been around for years and question them in the appropriate context. When questioning those assumptions, he offers long thought out reasons and concrete proof (with real world data) why a second look is warranted. With those questions, Gary also gives multiple ways to solve the problem going forward. When others suggest to simply throw everything away and start over, Gary plans incremental changes which will ultimately serve to create a stronger foundation for the architecture as a whole. Without question, Gary's passion comes out in his leadership of others through mentoring, experience and leading by example. Gary will sit down with all levels of engineers and mentor them to excel in their own field and become passionate about software development in their own right. He uses his almost two decades of experience to instill values and processes which will ultimately help others' careers. And one of the things I respect the most is his leading by example by coding just as much as he architects and manages. We all want to love what we do. Gary truly enjoys all aspects of computer science. In my many years in the business, I have only met a handful of people who have shown the type of passion, joy and caring that Gary does about software development, enterprise architectural design, and the people who get it done.”

“Gary is an exceptional development leader and architect who I have had the pleasure of working with day-to-day over the last few years at Guidance. Gary is very well-rounded and magnifies his deep technical abilities by being a great mentor and teacher to everyone he works with. Technically, what impresses me most about Gary is his ability to balance a focus on the big picture, like matching enterprise software architecture to customer environments, while keeping an eye on the smallest development details. In addition to technical depth and breath, Gary is also a very creative problem solver who can take a seemingly insurmountable technical problem and find a solution that will meet key business deadlines. As a manager, Gary is a great leader and teacher. He takes time to mentor and grow employees while providing career development opportunities and subject matter expertise. Best of all, his team enjoys working for him - a sign of a great manager. Lastly, Gary is a fantastic development partner for any product management organization and is an absolute pleasure to work with. He understands how to lead and work collaboratively with others to develop and ship great software.”