Blooming Late, Blooming Big: Mike McGarr Makes A Career In Continuous Integration

Blooming Late, Blooming Big: Mike McGarr Makes A Career In Continuous Integration

Mike admits he was a bit of a late bloomer. He got started programming after college, but got to work quickly. He developed his coding chops working for Booz Allen Hamilton, the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, and the National Science foundation.

He quickly noticed a trend of waterfall style IT development in his work. It took a lot of manpower, repeated communication, and unnecessary time to roll out changes into production. The more Mike focused on this systemic structural problem, the more fascinated he became in Dev Ops. This was the moment where Mike felt his history degree come to life in a new way.  He could use his liberal arts education which underscored identifying principles, and taking a macro view of complicated issues in a technical space.

[Catch Mike’s talk “Using Netflix OSS to manage deployments to AWS” at Signal, May 19th – 20th in San Francisco]

Mike gobbled up all the information he could on Dev Ops, and streamlining the production cycle. He poured over the famed book, Continuous Delivery, and toyed around with Jenkins and Hudson.

“It was my own neurosis of wanting to have things repeatable and reliable that opened that up,” said Mike. “I swallowed up that book whole. That changed my career in programming,”

His self proclaimed neurosis paid off big time last year when he moved across the country to take a job at Netflix as Engineering Manager for the Netflix Build Tools team.

If there are two words that define Mike’s philosophy at Netflix, they’re (unsurprisingly) continuous delivery. Yes, it’s a buzzword, but to Mike continuous delivery isn’t just something to talk circles around. It’s a value that guides the way Netflix ships products, and the way Netflix builds culture.

“There is no excellent engineering team composed of a few average engineers, and a few great engineers,” says Mike. He’s pretty good with backing up his philosophical claims with very specific evidence. This is a likely result of being a history buff, and veteran programmer.

Mike argues that the Netflix team as a whole is defined exclusively by the excellence of individuals. Neflix holds each individual to an incredibly high standard – culturally and technically. And if you don’t meet that standard, it might be time to find a new team. “Adequate performance gets you a generous severance package,” Mike jests with an heir of confidence, having finally found the right team for a “late bloomer” like him.