Meet James Jewhurst: Volie’s Director of Engineering

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Volley Rally. Today I'm joined by yet another member of our dev team, James Jewhurst. Welcome to Volley Rally.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

James has never been on with us before, but he's a crucial member of our dev team. He is the director of engineering. If you guys tuned into Antoine's video that we posted the other week, then you'll know that recently the dev team has gone through some changes and we got to hear what that shift was like from his perspective. But what about you? You know, you've been with the company now with a year under your belt. How. How has that shifted worked for you guys in the department?

I think it's going well. You know, with change, there's always some adjustments that everybody has to make, but I think it's going well. When I started with the company, I was in a unique position kind of doing some of these things on my own, and so I kind of implemented a lot of these things that are now becoming the team strategy. So it's very exciting to kind of meet together and talk about what that strategy is and then started putting it together with the team. And we just started it this week. So, you know, first couple might be rough, but very excited to see where this takes us.

Yeah, there's bound to be hiccups when there's new things being adapted to departments, but that's exciting. What are you guys spending a lot of your time on right now? What's the main focus? Work wise for the department?

Yeah, right now we're working on a lot of bug fixes, trying to make things smoother for the customers, and also new features coming down. You know, we have a lot of things. We were just at nada. So we're going to have some new items coming from there as well. And, you know, we just want to stay ahead of the curve. So being able to put some of these kind of processes around that allow us to have better expectation and play with the team. So, you know, individually, you know, engineers are working, you know, in smaller chunks, but the overall picture is we're building new features, we're going to add more things to the, to the product, benefit our customers.

And I have to say, I'm not an expert in the Volley app by any stretch of the imagination. I don't get to be in it very often, but I do go in there, I pull some numbers for us to be able to share on the marketing side of things. I have noticed the app toggling between pages is Faster. I mean, like, I can tell that you guys are working not only on the big picture things, you know, pushing out, you know, new reporting, dashboard type stuff, but also the little things. And I think that's, you know, one of the things that really makes your department so good at what you do is you don't let the little things get by. You know, you're not worried about just putting this out there to put it out there and to be done and check it off your list. When it's out there, it's perfect. And you're not done perfecting it ever. You know, you're, you're constantly fixing it, you're constantly fine tuning it and it's, I mean, it shows from someone who isn't even using it every day. So I'm sure the agents and the managers getting to use it every day. Definitely, definitely see that and feel that too.

Yeah, totally agree. We spent a lot of time, especially the last few months focusing on the infrastructure of the application, the architecture that surrounds it, and we've made a lot of improvements. This allows us to ship better code, better features that are more, you know, that are faster, smoother, they're more quality, but allows us to just do it reliably and consistently. And so hopefully over the, you know, coming months, that just improves and gets better and better. So it's great to hear that you're already seeing some of those improvements. You know, I'm not in the app every day myself, but I'm working with parts of it, so it's nice to hear that feedback that, you know, we do notice those things.

Yeah, absolutely. What, what would you say is the biggest shift, responsibility wise, what your role looks like, your day to day from when you started versus now being in more of a leadership type role.

Yeah, so, I mean, when I came on board, I was a senior engineer. I was primarily working on my own project known as the Integrations API. And I spent the better part of almost a year in that application building it, bring it to production, and it's now used every day. We have a lot of traffic in and out of that. It works with our solutions program, stuff like that. And so while setting all that up, I, like I said, I put a lot of these processes in place in a small, isolated area. And, you know, I think management saw the benefits from that. When the team started, when I added a few more people to the team, we could, we had reliable metrics, we had measurements, we could see the velocity of our small team. And so for me, the biggest changes I'm not coding anymore, but I'm taking all of those strategies and implementations and taking it across the broader team. How does that interact with not only the engineers, but the support staff, the customer support staff, the sales team. We're all reliant on each other in our own different ways. To me, it's really important that it's like when a new town is built, everybody on the horse is just running in. They're coming in from the back, from the front. Cool. That works. That gets you where you're going. But to, you know, build a commerce and build a town and have a capital, you know, you need roads and you need buses. And so I think a lot of the past few months we spent a lot of time doing that. And, you know, we'll spend the next few months improving what we've already done. So it'll be an exciting time.

What do you think will be the biggest challenge? You know, we've, we've gotten here and, you know, we've made adjustments to get to this point, and the growth for volley is exponential in the future, what do you think that next phase of things is going to look like? What do you think the biggest obstacle we'll have in that is? And how we might tackle that from a dev perspective on the coding side of things?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it could be a lot of different areas that that hits. I think our biggest challenge is just up leveling ourselves and being able to continue with that throughput or output of code and reliable features. With things emerging in the market, like AI and those tools, how can we better utilize them to make sure that not only our engineers are improving themselves every day, which in turn writes better code, but also so that we can build faster and we can build more that way. When we have the demands of the customers and the things they need to improve their own business, we don't have to say, sure, we can get to that x time, we can move a lot faster. So I think, you know, our biggest struggle is, is how do we make sure we're consistently moving forward and always catching speed, not never stagnating or getting to a point where, hey, this is a good speed. It's no much like a race car driver, we want to go faster. And so I think it's just a matter of putting the tools and the process in place, educating the teams and the stakeholders involved and bringing back feedback and then making adjustments. Right. It's like if you're trading in the markets, you have to make your adjustments for as you as you buy stocks. So same thing we're doing here is, you know, when we get a little bit bigger, we have more customers, we'll make an adjustment. When we have more engineers, we'll make an adjustment. But our plan is to keep, you.

Know, moving forward and the customers and their feedback really does play a huge part into, you know, what you guys do. I hear Peter talk about it all the time. You know, you guys will. Will come up with something and it's beautiful and it's incredible and you'll give it to the customers and they'll use it in a completely different way than it was intended for, or at least what you had in mind when you built it out, but still beautiful and still works for what they want it to do. And you're like, this was not even on my radar that it would, you know, be incorporated in this way in the bdc. And, and I think that's really cool. And we're fortunate to have a great customer success department that does a great job communicating with our customers and getting that feedback to us and then in turn getting that to you guys so that you guys can keep making a product that our customers love. So it's really awesome and it's a huge unsung hero. Part of customer retention really is you guys continuing to keep our people happy.

Yeah, it's huge. That customer relationship is huge.

Yeah. Looking outside of work, tell us a little bit about James Jewhurst. Take off the developer coder hat per a minute. Who are you? Outside of Ollie?

Yeah. I mean, that's hard. I mean, outside of Ali, I still, you know, I love to tinker with code and new things that are out there, new AIs. I love to play around with those. But let's say I'm just closing a laptop lid for a minute. You know, I like to kick back, play some video games. My son, I have a 15 and a half year old son, he plays video games. Sometimes we play together. I like to hang out with the family, watch the birds in the backyard and bird feeder. I love to travel. You know, one of the things that I, we try to do as a family is visit all the MLB parks in the United States. We're only about seven or eight in.

Yeah.

But we have plans to add a few more this year.

You're speaking my language. I'm a big baseball girl. I played college softball. So baseball's. Baseball is my life.

Yeah. Well, ironically, my son loves watching softball. He has since he was like 7 or 8 years old. So it's Always on. College ball is always on. You know, he plays in a league, stuff like that. So it's just, you know, Amanda, my wife, is. She's a big baseball fan and so it's just kind of like a family thing. We get to do is go to the stadium, enjoy a game, have a hot dog and soda and just kind of have a good memory.

Oh, you can't beat it.

No, you really can't.

There's nothing like it. A hot dog and a soda at the ball field. It is. That's top tier right there. That's awesome. That's so much fun. What is something that you are personally really excited about that's coming up with Volley with the company? You know, just, just anything in that realm. What are you looking forward to?

It's kind of a few things that lead into one. And for me, I think it's just ultimately Volley's growth and where we're going, you know, I think we had a fantastic. Nada. The feedback that I've heard from, you know, people that were there was just amazing. The photos were amazing. Our partnership with Techon is just fantastic, you know, so for me, that's where I get excited of, like, where we're going, you know, we're going to, like I said, we're going to start adding in more tooling and stuff to our own engineers, which is also exciting. And I think those are things that contribute to our growth. You know, I know the sales team's working hard. They're working on some bigger deals and some new functions that want to come in. And so to me, you know, just a symbiotic relationship that everybody seems to have together is why I'm excited. It's why I look forward to coming in today. Coming in Talk Working people's. Everybody has the same goal. It's to help our customer achieve their success and then help ourselves achieve our own success.

Yeah, absolutely. I. We have someone that just joined my department and I was talking about it with earlier this week. I said, you know, you're going to catch on very quickly, that everybody at volley from the very tippy, tippy top, you know, talking about Scott, our CEO, all the way down the ladder, wants you to be as successful as possible in your role, even if that means that you don't stay with us forever. But I feel like they know what they're doing because in turn it makes you just want to stay forever, you know, because you're so. You're so happy and you're so satisfied in the workplace and everybody just works so well together. And like you said, we all want the same thing, you know, and we're excited to grow together. And, you know, that's at the heart of it. That's really what Bali is all about. So.

Yeah, and I think that's a great point, too, is, you know, I've always felt that I've been encouraged to not fail, but, like, leap, you know, and that's what I really enjoyed and appreciated from Peter specifically, is, is knowing where you're at all the time, you know, and when you have an idea, they want to hear it. Even if, like, they don't take it, they want to hear it, they want to debate it. And so that just kind of really makes you feel, like, welcome, like you're part of the team and you're really pushing something forward together, and just. It just makes it so much more rewarding when it's like that, you know? So that. That, for me, is one of the things that I enjoy.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, James, thank you so much for being on with us today. We really appreciate it. It's. It's been so much fun getting to sit down and talk with you today.

Thank you. This is very fun, and hopefully I did okay, but, yeah, I appreciate it.

You did great. You did great. I promise I wouldn't lie to you. No, I probably would.

You got. You got to give me.

You know, I'm just kidding. Well, thank you so much for being on with us today and for everybody else watching at home, have a fantastic day.