By Korinne Condie
Announcing Our Two New Team Members
We recently welcomed two new team members! Though they haven’t been here long, they are already making an enormous impact on our team. Dave Potter, our new Senior DevOps Engineer, has been a great asset to our Development Team, and Sarah Crank, our new Technical Project Manager, has been incredible on our Customer Support team. Despite these interesting, Coronavirus times, both have very busy helping us build an even better Kaseware product for our customers. Now let’s get to know more about these two outstanding team members!
Dave Potter
Senior DevOps Engineer
In Dave’s words: “Growing up in the Four Corners area in Aztec, New Mexico (a very small town of 6,000 people about 30 minutes south of Durango), most of my time was spent alternating between sports and video games.
I did it all – wrestling, soccer, baseball, football (even bowling). In high school, in addition to focusing on baseball (both center field and pitcher), I was also a band nerd (I played drums) and a mathlete. From arcade battles, to baseball tournaments, to marching band competitions, needless to say I kept myself very busy. Video games were mainly sports/fighting – think Madden and Mortal Combat – but it wasn’t until college that I got into the video game genres that I still play today.
I didn’t own my first computer until my freshman year of college, so I was late to the wonderful world of first person shooters, but with the aid of some great new friends, I arrived with a vengeance (in between classes of course), where I studied electrical engineering and applied mathematics at New Mexico State University.
During my junior year, I had the opportunity to work in the Physical Science Laboratory, a government funded program designed to train students and send them on internships to remote locations. I worked part time during the fall semester, and in spring semester deployed for 6 months to a location to work at a classified facility. I was lucky enough to go through this timeline twice, the first at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, and the second at Menwith Hill in Harrogate, England. Best story from England – they take golf REALLY serious in England (there was a point where I was pretty convinced I was going to be intentionally hit by a ball), but at least we had a pint together afterwards.
After graduation in 2008, it was back to Buckley Air Force Base, working for Northrop Grumman as a software test engineer. Three years later, I had the opportunity to move to El Paso, Texas, working on Ft Bliss at the El Paso Intelligence Center. Having gone to school near there, I jumped at the opportunity to move back (I was unique; as you can imagine there were not a lot of people chomping at the bit to move to that area). Working for a new company (Bit Systems), I was in El Paso for 2 years and then moved back to Denver where I started training in DevOps concepts, mainly test automation and continuous integration. After a few years, I took these skills to a new project, where I was able to combine them with all the new, “hot” technologies, such as cloud development, microservice architecture, Docker, and Kubernetes.
After 10+ years in the government space, I wanted to find a new place that maintained the same values that I held in high regard from my previous job – a place that treated their employees well and where the work made a real difference. I was spoiled from my last company; I wanted a family, not a job. So in October of 2019, I joined Kaseware, where I was able to continue work that made a real difference. From the day I was hired, it has been right into the deep end – I had a flight scheduled to Ohio for my first deployment before my first day! I am very excited to see where we go – I appreciate the opportunity to be a core part of a newer company with this much potential, and look forward to advancing our product, keeping us as cutting edge and efficient as possible.”
Sarah Crank
Technical Project Manager
In Sarah’s words: “I grew up and went to college in little ol’ Wyoming. Growing up in Casper, I lived to perform. I did everything from singing, dancing, musicals, cheerleading, and playing instruments – violin, piano (and now ukulele). Continuing with that passion, I started college at the University of Wyoming as a vocal performance major. During my junior year, I made the choice to change my major to a field where I could see myself having a steady job “when I grew up.” So I switched to marketing, kept a minor in music (but was able to keep singing in the choir), and graduated in 2015.
After college, my husband and I decided to try something completely different and packed up and moved to the Tampa Bay area of Florida with just us, our dog Piper, and no jobs. We settled in, and I started working as a project manager in the marketing department of Feld Entertainment.
Feld puts on several live touring shows like Disney on Ice, Monster Jam, and Marvel Universe Live which meant I spent the greater part of three and a half years talking about monster trucks and superheroes. I’m a proud, self-proclaimed nerd and love the Marvel movies and universe, so it was awesome to work on with that brand. I got to see the web ads, TV ads, posters—you name it—all over the world in the US, London, Australia, South Africa (just to name a few) that I had a hand in creating. One of the coolest projects I worked on was an airport takeover, where we had posters EVERYWHERE advertising Marvel Universe Live. They were lining the walls, all over the escalators, basically covering the airport head to toe.
After a few years in Project Management, I realized that I wanted to get more into the technical side of my job (I always seemed to find myself acting as the “tech” person at work), so I enrolled in a coding boot camp at the University of Central Florida. It was an online class, and for six months I spent 30 – 40 hours per week coding on top of my full-time job.
As much as we loved our friends and family in Florida, my husband and I realized that we were homesick. We sold our house in Florida and moved back to the Rocky Mountains on New Year’s Eve of 2019 (once again without jobs or a place to live, but still had Piper). Luckily, I was able to keep working for Feld remotely for a few months until I found a new job.
After taking the coding boot camp, I realized I didn’t want to code all day, but I wanted to find a Technical Project Manager (TPM) job which combines the tech side with the Project Management I loved. I was picky about where I applied and was looking for a TPM job at a small company. I applied to Kaseware, and after talking to the team (and reading a few glowing reviews online), I joined the family in March of 2020. After working in entertainment (which was fun), it is incredibly rewarding to know that what I am doing could make a difference in the world vs. just selling tickets.
I joined Kaseware in early March, and it has been a unique experience so far. After just two weeks, we were ordered to shelter-in-place due to the COVID-19 virus. At that point, I hadn’t even met all the team, so it has been an adjustment to learn a completely new field, a new product, and work with people – all remote. Fortunately, I have had some experience working from home with my last job (not to mention Piper Puppy is LOVING me being home all day), but I am so excited to finally get back to work and actually meet everyone I have been talking to for the past few weeks.”
Thank you Dave and Sarah. We are so excited to have you both on our team!
Schedule a free demo today to learn more about us, our support offerings, and our incredible product features.
Korinne Condie is the Chief Customer Officer at Kaseware. She is a former government contractor with extensive experience in system engineering, operations and customer success within both government and corporate organizations.