Can you give us a bit of background on yourself? When did you join EY, where were you prior to joining, current role, etc.?
I grew up rural Niagara Falls, Canada on a hobby-farm. My interest in music and technology are side-by-side, if not entwined altogether. I moved to Toronto after college to live in the basement of a historic rock and roll venue called El Mocambo and work on an entirely bizarre web project with the owner, with bar hours. I spent my 20s focused on rock and roll, while steadily developing my career in web development through a sequence of unplanned surprises – 4 of which were in the form of merger or acquisition. And voila, this succinctly describes the path to my role as Technology Manager at EY Design Studio Toronto.
As a Technology Manager in the EY Design Studio TOR office, what are some challenges and fun experiences you face in your role?
Helping clients with existing infrastructure. Not everything can by shiny and new. I’ve had the pleasure and pain of advising on, auditing, or outright inheriting several legacy systems. From getting things set up for a new team to work on, to deploying the first pieces of new code the process generally involves a lot of mapping and debugging but it provides small, steady wins. When real joy come to fruition is when you begin to see meaningful change and revive a system that may have become neglected – which takes just a short period of time at the current pace of digital change.
You refer to yourself as a drummer, do you moonlight as a drummer on weekends? Favorite drummer/band/drum solo?
I’m a drummer all the time. It’s part of how I think (in patterns and in chemistry/dynamics), and I think its part of what makes me a cooperative leader. Communicating timing is perhaps my life’s work. I’ve even written about the overlapping skills of drumming and developing. But, in practice, I haven’t played for an audience in nearly 2 years. I’d been in bands up until then. You’ll see from my office set up though, that I’ve brought music back into view as a priority.
I had to look up some of the drummer’s names that have impressed me most - Brennan Saul with Brasstronaut, Ronald Bruner Jr. with Kamasi Washington, Len Clark of Colour Revolt, Emma Gaze of Electrelane. My drumming route was probably Andy Stochansky when he played with Ani DiFranco in the late 90s.
Every creative tends to have their own tools of the trade…can you share a photo of your desk setup or items that you always have on you and why?
My setup is pretty simple for working. I use a Mac, so dongles. I keep notes on paper and on my stickies. I use VS Code and iTerm2 with zsh. I prefer command line to GUIs for most operations. People say I’m working in the matrix when they see my screens. We have nice 5k monitors at the office but like to work on the same screen that most people use so that the products I develop are realistic for most people. Super huge beautiful monitors have the pitfall of creating layouts that are too big for most people.
What is something people don’t know about you because the right question hasn’t gotten around to you yet?
Most people don’t seem to know that I’m trans. But then again, total strangers can seem to zero in on this in a fraction of a second – so, I’m never too sure what people know about me these days.
Last question, you’re a karaoke game show, however instead of getting judged for your singing ability you get judged for how many members of the crowd sing along with you…What is your karaoke song?
This may depend on whether people have been drinking or not, but I’ve had great results with Dreams by the cranberries. People seem to react well to the Irish yodeling bit at the end.
