Meet Tavis, our patient Front-End Developer who bridges the gap between data and design to create smooth, intuitive experiences in the runZero platform. Before discovering his love for web development, Tavis spent time teaching middle school math—an experience that shaped his zen, problem-solving approach, and his belief that anyone can learn something new with curiosity and persistence.
Outside of work, you can find Tavis enjoying the quiet country life in Maryland with his wife and cats, hitting the hiking trails, or traveling. Read on to learn more about Tavis and why he thinks runZero is a great place to work!
Q&A #
► What drives your passion for continuous learning and professional development in your role?
This industry is great because there are always new technologies, different ways of doing things, different techniques, and libraries you can use to make your job easier. Web development, with its ever-changing nature, forces me to stay up to date. So, you kind of have to be up on the trends, and when new things come along, try them out, and when picking new technologies or tools, it's trial and error. If it's easy to use and you get good results, great. If not, throw it away, try a different option, or build something yourself.
Something new I’m learning as a front-end developer is some Golang code. Normally, I stay away from the back end, but trying to make things work is how I learn best. I take a simple task, or what would be a simple task for a backend engineer, and push myself to complete it. It's been an interesting challenge!
► What makes runZero different from other organizations that you've worked at?
I would say it’s runZero’s openness, transparency, and cohesiveness. We all work together to create this positive and supportive vibe for our teammates. There is not a lot of siloing like I've seen at other companies I’ve worked for. For example, I think collaboration between engineering and customer success is awesome. They are the direct source to our users' needs and frustrations. We do a great job of including people from our Customer Engineering Team on calls when developing new features.
Through this partnership, we get the customer’s side of the story and can better understand their needs. The CSE Team is also really good at helping with various ideas on approaching problems and translating customer pain points to us. As an engineering team, we see a support request, but when we can get a little more insight from the customer success folks, you know, that sort of unwritten part of the request, it helps us get to the heart of the problem a little quicker.
► What things stood out for you about our management team?
Our management team feels like humans and not just figureheads pointing and directing you. They're very hands-on. HD, especially as our CEO! He's still answering support tickets and coding new things. He’s very focused on the customer, which you don't often get from a CEO. Engineering management does a good job of cultivating a culture of customer care and responding to support tickets quickly. I don't do a lot of support as a frontend engineer, but at the end of the process, I know customers thank us so much, and mention how quickly we respond to their issues.
There are no egos here; I like that even HD will call himself out, like, "Hey, you know, I messed this up," or whatever. People are humble, admit if they make a mistake, and learn from it to do better next time.
► What’s something on your bucket list?
I love to travel. So I would put visiting Alaska, way up there towards the top of my bucket list. I would love to get up there for a cruise and do some exploration, like see glaciers or some grizzly bears. I’m a big-time tree hugger and have always been interested in nature and animals, and caring for them. Anytime I'm out in nature and kind of leaving the world behind, is my happy place. I also really want to see the Northern Lights one of these days. So, if not Alaska, maybe Iceland instead!
