Evan Farrar

Kitchensurfing

Product Engineer

May 2013 – February 2015

At Kitchensurfing I was the second non-founder on the Product team. I developed features for the product on a daily basis and did technical analysis of planned features. I managed two engineers. I developed Kitchensurfing's first iPhone app. I served as an interim product manager while we hired our first product manager and during that time spearheaded the first prototype of what would become the Same-day dinner product. I was the acting Director of Engineering during an extended absence by my superior and during that time attended board meetings to represent the engineering team's schedules, plans, and interests while also managing a team of 6. I developed our engineering interview process and worked on our hiring plan.

Pivotal Labs

Software Engineer

August 2010 – May 2013

I helped companies learn to deliver software quickly and sustainably, with XP and good engineering practices. Pivotal Labs taught mostly by actions, not just words: pairing with client developers and delivering working software directly to client product owners. I worked on some big products with thousands of requests a minute and some small products that didn't even know what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Hopscotch

Co-founder

September 2011 – April 2012

After doing a hackathon and a side project together my friends Samanth and Jocelyn we decided we really wanted to work together on something we were passionate about: introducing programming to kids, especially girls. We wanted to accomplish this with a visual programming environment on the iPad. Working on Hopscotch I did everything I could that was needed: branding, product management, hands-on UX testing with kids, wireframing, pitching investors, coding, illustration and animation. The first app I worked on, "Daisy the Dinosaur":https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/daisy-the-dinosaur/id490514278?mt=8, is still in the app store today and the company is still releasing versions of their second product, Hopscotch, with thousands of daily users.

Opensprints

Founder / LLC Member

September 2007 – April 2012

In 2007 I created an open source version of Gold Sprints (computer driven stationary bicycle racing) for friends. More people started to use it; my software and hardware became the de facto worldwide standard with hundreds of installations worldwide. A user of the software, Jonathan Morrison, approached Electrical Engineer Luke Orland and I to turn it into a business to service higher end or less technical clients who wanted something custom but didn't want to modify the software or assemble the hardware themselves. We used that revenue to make OpenSprints more consumer friendly and to refine the product further. In 2012 I sold my share of the company to my co-founders to focus on Hopscotch.

Groupon

Software Engineer

January 2010 – June 2010

I joined a handful of engineers working at Groupon very early in their trajectory. I was the first engineer hired after the launch of Groupon and I learned some hard lessons about how to persuade adoption of new technical practices without rocking the boat. At groupon I helped them tame their massive and flaky test suite, optimized SQL, integrated with pre-release facebook features, learned how to deploy to massive constantly changing systems with minimal downtime, did live production debugging and disaster recovery, and launched Groupon's first rewards program.

Centro

Software Engineer

May 2006 – July 2009

At Centro I worked on a small team to develop the company's media management system in Ruby on Rails. Rails was a new framework at the time. Our application provided a UI to explore the thousands of local online advertisers available and their rates to allow Centro's sales team to create national online display advertising plans for clients. Our process was agile using index cards, pairing, TDD and a domain expert as the product owner. I also developed a prototype for a live ad tearsheet generator in Erlang. We moved from SVN to git and were early github users.