Large-Scale Web Development

Scott has a rare combination of great technical experience and the ability to clearly communicate advice

Scott is incredibly smart and very good humored. I always leave a call with him with tons of new ideas and in a great mood.

I would work with Scott again any day. He always made time to communicate his vision and then empowered his team to accomplish their individual missions in creative and lean ways. Under Scott, I was able to find a way to connect my personal passions with the needs of the business and succeed. That's a rare trait for leaders today.

Over Scott’s long tenure as CTO at Cheezburger, he has built and nurtured a great technical team. Nearly every one of my coworkers was hired by Scott, so he is the nucleus around which our culture has formed. We are an effective distributed team because of Scott’s leadership. Scott is a constant advocate for his employees. He roots for us when we have an especially difficult challenge. He defends us when things don’t go the way the rest of the company wants. And he always points out when we have done something impressive.

Scott’s greatest value is protecting his development team from distractions. One source of distractions is production issues. Scott envisioned a team of on-call engineers called “Dr. Tiny Cat” and “Nurse Tiny Kitten” that serve as troubleshooting technicians and incident managers. These roles accelerate the debugging of issues that come up, as well as keeping the rest of the team working without dragging everyone into the firefight. Also, there are lots of great product ideas at Cheezburger, but we would never get anything done if we flitted from one spontaneous idea to the next. Scott filters and smooths out the creative fountain into a controllable stream of feature work. Another way he reduces distractions is a relentless focus on quality. I am proud of our continuous integration and continuous deployment systems at Cheezburger, and Scott deserves credit for that success.

Scott was a great manager - he took care of his employees better than anyone else I've ever worked for. drugstore.com was a very crazy place at the time, and Scott always managed to shield his team from most of the noise around us.

Given the opportunity, I'd work for or with Scott again in a heartbeat.

Scott is a go-to thinker. Always willing to listen, help, and solve problems. He is a real treat to work with, the sort of person you look forward to interacting with on any problems - from the mudane to the very critical.