Humans of Tepia: Dustin

We’re going to introduce ourselves in the way we know how: by talking tech and early memories and the things that we like.

To start, here’s Dustin, our project manager, in his own words:

1. What’s your earliest tech memory?

My earliest tech memory is playing with a 386 my dad picked up for a home office. Toying around with DOS and tho 5 1/4″ floppy discs. Then a few years later on another modern marvel of a machine installing a 9.6 baud modem and Windows 3.1.

2. What’s your day to day like?

Yoga, walk the dog, 5min high intensity training, early morning calls for my pet projects, meetings and discussions with our globally distributed teams working my way from east to west from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles, then calls with clients interspersed with notes, messages, and calls to our teams relaying updates, meeting with young talented individuals seeking an opportunity to join our team, reviewing materials delivered by our teams and providing guidance/ feedback. It seems like a lot, but it goes by so fast!

3. Developers are superstitious, and so are engineers. Do you have a favourite computer superstition or ritual that probably doesn’t work – but you still do it anyway?

I talk to my computer when it is not doing what I want it to do. I even adopt a pleading tone and try a little positive reinforcement. Whatever works!

4. How did you end up working at Tepia?

I was working on my own tech startups at the time and we rented an office next to where Abe was renting space for Tepia Co, which back then was — well, just Abe. We got to know one another and I started working for Abe; it was just an incredible opportunity to both get paid for indulging in my addiction to startups and a way to help others learn from my experience in the world of software development.

5. What’s your favourite project that you’ve worked on so far?

Oh man, that is a tough one! I have fallen in love with all of my projects. One of my favourites, though, was this a marketplace where we automated all aspects of an incredibly complex process for management of digital media production — there were more than 50 pages of dense text describing the pricing algorithms alone. Then, there are those that afford me the opportunity to become an expert in a new industry, which I always appreciate since I like to learn. My top favourite projects, though, are probably those where we are given the opportunity to take part in creating something amazing for a good cause.

6. What’s the office culture like?

Not sure, I haven’t been to our office in a few years! I’ve spent more than half of my time at Tepia Co all over the world, just working from my laptop wherever I happen to be. That being said, we try to make sure that our “culture” is supportive and quality driven. We all seem to share the condition where we expect more from ourselves than is reasonable and strive to meet our own unrealistic expectations – I’m proud to say that when something goes wrong everyone sees it as an opportunity for us all lto earn and do better next time, and it creates this culture where we’re happy to celebrate our failures and learn from them collectively.

7. What’s your ultimate dream-big project – the one you’re working towards, the one that’ll blow all the other projects out of the water?

I would be over the moon for a project enabling or forwarding the interest of an environmental cause – even better if it gives me an excuse to improve user input experience!