Software & Engineering Director
Originally from New Zealand, Lawrence now lives with his family in the USA as a key part of our Seattle team. He was the first software engineer hired on staff over 30 years ago in Australia.
How long have you worked here?
30 years, this past April 8th. I get to claim the honour of being the longest serving employee who quite literally "started in the garage back in Australia".
What's the most recent thing related to venue360 that you've worked on? Tell us about it.
A rewrite of the RolePlay roles-based application framework used by venue360 to define and launch tasks for the application. As well as bringing an entirely clean-room design and modern codebase for a component that is the heart of the application, this reduced startup overhead on a typical network from 60 requests / 980 KB / 5 seconds, down to 13 requests / 315 KB / 0.8 seconds.
I also have a clean-room rewrite of the SQL interface component which is nearing production release.
As a developer what's the most notable things you've worked on at our company before venue360?
That's hard to say. I designed, wrote and continue to maintain the web application server that venue360 and our other web products run on. I co-designed, co-wrote, and continue to maintain Strategi(TM) and RolePlay/400 on the IBM-i. By the time it reached end-of-life I'd written a good chunk of the host modules for ATFM, and the entire codebase of its QNX "coprocessor" system.
At this point, I believe it's fair to say that there's no product here that I have not made a significant contribution too, since even if I am not involved in the app itself, it runs on my middleware.
What do you enjoy about working with venue360?
I thought about this hard, and my conclusion is that it's the people I work with.
In a society that's become polarized to the extreme, staff at ABL consistently demonstrate a genuine appreciation of each other and for the value that each brings to the table.
This results in a working environment that has become rare in a tech sector where diversity of view is increasingly penalized. Though some share my Christian beliefs, and others don't, I cannot really express how much I appreciate the fact that everyone in the company from top to bottom is great to work with and respects each other, and appreciate the leadership that fosters this level of harmony.
If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life what would it be?
That's easy. Irish shepherd's pie with meat cooked in Guinness Stout.
What are you passionate about?
Personally: In a word, Truth. With a practical focus on harmonizing scientific discovery and the Christian worldview, and that the latter is philosophically the best explanation of the world we live in. That is, showing that God's world and God's word speak the same truth. If science and scripture appear to disagree on any point, you are misinterpreting one, or the other... or both.
Professionally: Excellence in design and coding. Some co-workers would probably add, "to a fault", and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But do note, excellence does not equate to perfection.
