A Recommendation of Eric Satterwhite

Working with Eric is, I imagine, akin to preparing dinner with a sushi master chef. He is one of the most confident developers, and rightly so. I have learned more from him in the last year than any other on our team. Eric’s not content with his current abilities, though - he is constantly seeking new challenges and paradigms to test.

When we hired Eric, he blew through all of my coding tests. I had to think of new ones. Over the course of working with our team, he would rewrite entire services, imposing consistent architecture and documentation. Usually, he would just be let loose on a microservice with the words, “How can we make this better?” and Eric would produce entire libraries that we could reuse in multiple layers and locations. He repeatedly saw straight through problems to the core and fixed the machinery beneath.

Personally, I learned from Eric often. I greatly enjoyed our conversations about testing the boundaries of the application stack or JavaScript itself. Unlike other fantastically talented people I have worked with, Eric is entirely transparent about the work he does. He documents his structure and thinking alongside the code, and readily discusses or explains the features or fixes he writes with developers of many experience levels. He is truly an asset of knowledge for everyone around him.

Upon joining our team, Eric decided to expand his dev-ops abilities. He was the architect behind a new microservice resource allocation, and implemented an automated testing & deployment process for our 10+ services. He wrote and taught a Docker course for our internal team and implemented a new monitoring system for each of our node.js services. He succeeded in writing an image color-analyzer in node.js that was 8x faster than ImageMagick. I could go on, but I’m more excited for the next challenge he decides to tackle.

While I would say that Eric is a team asset solely for his technical excellence, I would selfishly say that I look forward more to challenging conversations with him about programming at large. Working with Eric is working with a master of his craft, and anyone is lucky to experience that.

As of this writing, Eric’s website is smugly situated at codedependant.net.