Writing Software That is Built to Last

We’re taking a moment to shine a spotlight on Liam Lloyd, our Senior Software Engineer. This post is co-written by Cecilia Krum, our Director of Engineering, and Liam.

Cecilia Krum: Liam Lloyd joined Permanent earlier this year after several years in mission-driven software development work and immediately became a leader on the team. We are thrilled to have him! He has been leading a major overhaul of our database which will enable us to make Permanent faster and easier to work with. Liam has also made a point of improving our code cleanliness and has made it easier for us to test our changes before putting them out in the world. 

When I first talked to Liam about Permanent, he told me that he wants to write great code and also wants to work at a nonprofit where serving society is our first priority. He brings great energy and thoughtfulness to our team discussions about how best to serve our members and improve Permanent for all of you. Plus, he has fun fixing bugs and has already made many small improvements in between his larger projects. If you follow our Releases on GitHub, know that many of the entries in the last few months are his doing.

Personally, Liam is a ton of fun to have on the team. He is always introducing us to new icebreaker games and telling us about his adventures with the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). It was wonderful to meet him in person during our staff retreat in Albuquerque last month. Thanks for everything you’ve contributed in your first few months and welcome to Permanent, Liam.

Liam Lloyd: One of the exciting things about working at Permanent is that our mission requires taking a long-term view of things. If we want to preserve across generations the legacies with which people and organizations entrust us, we need to write software that is built to last. I find that challenge very compelling, and I strive to meet it by writing code with a high degree of craftsmanship, approaching even routine tasks that I’ve done countless times before with the care that I imagine a master carpenter devotes to each piece of a chair or table. Just as a masterfully crafted chair will outlast its many more hastily constructed peers, masterfully crafted software, kept simple and decoupled and well-organized, will do the same. I can’t claim to be a master craftsman of software yet (especially not of Permanent’s main languages of PHP and Typescript, which I’ve only been working in for a few months), but it is what I strive toward, and at Permanent that goal aligns perfectly with the organizational mission.