The Essence of Shipping Code: a CTO's Perspective | Flowcode’s Mike Hamrah

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
And the thing that I've seen when I like talk to the community is the happiest teams and developers ship code. They ship code all the time, right?
Yeah, so they go hand in hand. The ones that are, yeah, the ones that are unhappy are like, I've been working on the project for six months and it hasn't gotten to production. So it's like, I don't know what my worth and value is to this company.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
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**Dan Lines** (1:00)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your host, Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO.
Today, we're joined by Mike Hamrah, CTO at Flowcode. Mike, welcome to the show.

**Mike Hamrah** (1:18)
Hey everybody, Dan, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:22)
Yeah, so awesome to have you with us today.
You have more than 20 years of software engineering experience. But before becoming Flowcode CTO, you were a VP of engineering at Bluecore. You were a chief architect at Namely and a technical lead at Uber, a small little known company. Actually, these are great engineering companies.
And today, you're joining us to talk about why the job of shipping code keeps getting abstracted away, what that means for engineers and the teams they work on. So we're going to dive into a bunch of those topics. But first, we always like to ask our guests kind of a little more about their background and their career and how you got into engineering and how you eventually became a CTO.

**Mike Hamrah** (2:20)
Great question. I can't believe I've been doing this for more than 20 years. I've been definitely going through the midlife crisis and the midlife career crisis.
As of late, I think a lot of us are, as we're coming out of COVID. But I've always loved technology. I've always loved building. My dad was an Apple computer reseller in the 80s and had a small business in the 80s selling Macs. So I kind of grew up around computers.
And I didn't really start programming until I was in college. And then when I entered the workforce, I was coming off of the.com bubble. So a lot of my CS grads were actually going into finance. And I kind of stayed in tech and had an interesting job working at a Shakespeare festival whose director was a consultant that did programming for law firms. And he was like, needed some help. And I was like, you know, I didn't have anything else going on. And it was a great first job because I really had to connect with customers, you know, being that young and just being like dropped in and having to chat with people and figure out what to do.
It was definitely figuring out a lot of stuff. But that communication, which I think has enabled me to be pretty successful throughout my career and forcing function of communication early, I think really helped me out.
And then I stumbled upon a startup that was doing fashion imagery and entertainment imagery that eventually got bought out by Getty Images. And I worked at Getty Images, which wasn't on the hit list, but a very great company that I met a lot of wonderful people and I had a lot of wonderful mentorship on it and spent many years at Getty Images before I moved on to Uber because I did want to, you know, this little small startup, I joined in 2015 and if you've seen the Showtime show, I joined right before the Beyoncé concert in Las Vegas, so I got to experience that. And Uber, I think, was a really great place. There are so many talented engineers that work there and the scaling challenges from an engineering perspective, I don't think that we actually talk about that enough and how interesting and challenging that was and how fast it was happening, that you really had to be focused and sharp on what you were delivering and how you were delivering it, which I still have carried with me through Namely and through Bluecore and now at Flowcode.

**Dan Lines** (4:50)
That's so cool. You got to see the queen bee, Beyoncé.